For a democratic Horn of Africa in the new millennium

By Dr. Maimire Mennasemay | August 27, 2007

In Ethiopia, a minority regime is riding roughshod over human, civil and political rights. Somalia has been in the clutches of political chaos since Said Barré’s assumption of power in 1969; and Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed’s 2006 ride into Mogadishu on the back of the Ethiopian military has not brought peace to the region. Moreover, there is the issue of Somaliland whose obscure legal status is a problem that harbors potentials for fratricide. Djibouti frets under the election-camouflaged repressive rule of the Rassemblement Populaire pour le Progrès. The situation in Eritrea is even more unstable. Eritreans, who welcomed their “independence” in 1993, now find themselves living under a “liberation” leader who has morphed into a dictator and ruined the economy. Border disputes compound these internal crises. The Ethiopian and Eritrean border dispute could re-erupt into war; the long-running territorial dispute between Ethiopia and Somalia is far from resolved; and Meles Zenawi’s decision to intervene militarily in the internal affairs of Somalia is likely to give a bitter edge to this long-standing conflict.

In addition, a profound economic underdevelopment, with no solution in sight under current circumstances, afflicts the region. The Horn countries depend on external sources for essential commodities such as food, medical supplies, educational material, agricultural inputs, transport and communication equipment, and so on. Unemployment is high, the economy is decrepit, and foreign direct investment, generally considered an indicator of economic vitality, is low (UNICTAD 2005); and the region’s participation in world trade is insignificant (World Trade Report 2006). Not surprisingly, the Horn countries, mired in political and economic crises, have become a cultural wasteland: there is scant research and development in the natural, social, health, and applied sciences. If “knowledge is power,” as modernity posits, and if modern man is, as a twentieth century philosopher puts it, he “who compels the unhappened to happen” and “makes the unseen, appear,” we are among the most powerless and the least ready to be full participants in humanity’s adventure of modernity. Endemic poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, preventable morbidity, premature mortality, and wars have transformed the Horn into a permanent recipient of international aid and charity. This need not be our fate in the new millennium.

There is no denying that the Horn is trapped in political, economic and cultural crises. But A crisis is not only the expression of danger; it is also an opportunity for a new solution. However, a new solution will not emerge if our thoughts and actions are confined to current problems. Not that immediate responses to ongoing events are unnecessary; rather, such responses could become part of the building material of a better society if we were to extend our vision and reflect on the kind of future that could become a beacon on the horizon guiding our thoughts and actions in the present. The only beacon on the horizon that could pierce the darkness that blankets the Horn is a millennium project of the Horn as a single Democratic Community.

The lesson of the departing millennium is that the imbrications of the Horn inhabitants are so complex and deep that it is unlikely that a divided Horn could permanently overcome the present multiple crises. The rational solution is for the Horn countries to transform themselves into a common democratic space. They could then tackle their problems with their combined human and natural resources instead of wasting these in pursuit of chimerical objectives, such as regional hegemony over each other, secession, or ethnic separation from each other. In the present corporate-dominated and globalized world, such objectives make sense only to those who profit from the internal divisions and conflicts of the Horn.

At first blush, the Horn as a Democratic Community sounds a reasonable ideal. However, the crucial question is how to make it possible. The traditional inter-state approach will not work, for, as experience shows, each state remains locked in the logic of its ruling elites’ interests camouflaged as “national” interests. A shift from the logic of “national” interests to that of the interests of the inhabitants of the Horn as a whole is necessary if the Horn is to emerge as a unified democratic community and its crises resolved successfully. Since this sounds utopian, I will raise and respond to some of the main objections to such a project.

First, some may object that the idea of a unified democratic Horn succumbs to a geographical determinism that conflates physical unity – the fact that the four countries form a compact territory in the Horn of Africa – with non-physical unity and underestimates the resistance to unity that the diversity of the Horn’s population generates. The objection here would stand if it were the case that diversity forms an insurmountable barrier to such a project. It is true that the Western epistemic gaze on the Horn has weighed heavily on the side that sharpens differences among the Horn’s inhabitants. The region’s ruling elites have made their own the West’s distorted view of the Horn and hardened these differences by using them as political tools of divide-and-rule, as one could see from Meles’s ethnic politics, Barré’s clan politics, and the Isayas-Sebhat-Meles trio’s assiduous cultivation of Eritrea’s Italian colonial identity. However, were we to make what we could become – a democratic, just and prosperous Horn community – the center of gravity of our reflection, we will not be trapped in this distorted image of irreconcilable differences. What the West says about us might be meaningful, but it does not mean it is true. Winston Churchill, confronted with the overwhelming cultural, linguistic and religious diversity in India, declared, “India is an abstraction… India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator”. However, Indians, whose self-understandings, as manifested in Gandhi’s actions, were rooted in their own interpretations of who they are and what they could become, proved Churchill wrong. In spite of its population of over one billion and its bewildering diversity – a diversity that by far outstrips that in the Horn – India is a united democratic community.

The example of India shows that diversity is a historical fact that is open to interpretations that could serve oppression or facilitate emancipation. Apartheid used diversity as a tool of oppression, whereas the African National Congress mobilized it for the purpose of emancipation. If the Horn’s inhabitants are now captives of endemic poverty, fragmentation and oppression, it is not because of diversity. The causes are the forces that harness diversity to maintain exploitation, fragmentation and oppression. If these forces are vanquished, the Horn can manifest itself as a symphony wherein each diversity necessarily needs the other for the full development of its self-expression. The idea that the Horn’s inhabitants cannot overcome ethnic and clan diversities rests on the untenable assumption that the people of the Horn are forever stuck with immutable, frozen self-understandings. Such an assumption is rooted in the well-known fallacy that reduces the reality of the Horn to the empirical observations of these realities. This kind of reductionism is what fans secessionism and ethnic/clan politics in the Horn.

Second, there is the history of the second millennium that has intertwined the inhabitants of the Horn. Since at least the reign of Amde Tsion (circa 1314-1344), there have been interactions between the various populations of the Horn mediated by wars, commerce, and religious expansions. These relations have deeply reworked major aspects of the life-conditions of the inhabitants of the region. The conflicts from the sixteenth century illustrate the point. The changes triggered by the wars of the charismatic Imam Ahmad Ibrahim al-Ghazi (1506-43), or Gragn, as the Ethiopians call him, wrecked the Ethiopian state and reconfigured the distribution of power, population and cultures, leading to new articulations of elites, ethnies and religions. One of the unintended consequences of Imam Ahmad’s campaigns was the increased porousness of the demographic, economic, political and cultural boundaries between the highlands and the lowlands of the Horn on a scale that did not exist before his rise to power. From this historical perspective, Imam Ahmad or Gragn is as much an Ethiopian as he is a Somali. He is a symbol of the possible unity of the Horn in that his effort to unify the Horn, even if it has a religious motivation, expresses the recognition of the existence of the Horn as a community of shared fate. This is one of the exceptional cases where one has to discard received wisdom and throw out the baby – Imam Ahmad’s goal of the religious unification of the Horn – and keep the historical bathwater, which brought to an end the isolation of clans, ethnies, regions and cultures, and made possible the birth of mutually binding antagonistic and non-antagonistic relations between them.

Third, the centuries of interactions between the Horn’s inhabitants that emerged from this new historical context open a new avenue for our self-understandings. They replace the preexisting sporadic relations with long-range interests that have matured into pan-ethnic, pan-clan, and pan-regional issues, amenable to approaches in terms of universal principles such as freedom, equality, fraternity and justice. That there are clans and ethnies in the Horn is true. However, being a Daarood, a Tigre, an Afar, a Welayita, an Oromo, an Anuak, or a Hamassein, and so forth, is neither natural nor unnatural. These identities are webs of social relations and are, therefore, open-ended and dynamic. Given our inherited shared background – part of which is admittedly a history of conquest and oppression that needs to be recognized so that we could cure the historical wounds that still fester in our current politics – these identities are historical, not only descriptively, but also affectively. There are, in the Horn, cultural and social practices that have, despite our differences, family resemblances in fundamental respects. Thus, to say an Isaaq is only an Isaaq, a Hamassein is only a Hamassein, or an Oromo is only an Oromo, an Anuak is only an Anuak, an Amhara is only an Amhara, or a Tigre is only a Tigre, and so on, is to succumb to a false conception of hermetically sealed ethnic and clan identities. Such a conception castrates the present from the history that constitutes it and occludes the richness of the Horn’s history that makes each identity non-identical with itself and, therefore, more than what it is.

Indeed, given our intertwined historical legacy, there is hardly a homogeneous cultural self in the Horn, a point that comes across clearly in the works of the two great writers of the Horn: Haddis Alemayhu and Nuruddin Farah. An extra dimension, historical in its origin, overflows every identity and cashes into the history of the other ethnic and clan identities, thus becoming a shared dimension. In this shared dimension, which, to adapt the Kierkegaardian expression, “is in us more than us”, and thus in excess of every ethnic and clan identity, gestate possibilities for forging a coalition of memories and aspirations for a better world that could facilitate the birth of the Horn as a shared democratic space. Only by refracting modernity through the prism of this shared dimension, could the Horn transcend its divisions and become the master of its destiny in the new millennium.

Fourth, another possible objection to the project of the Horn as a Democratic Community is the one that refers to the physical environment of the region. Markakis (1998) argues that the Horn’s environment is poor, increasing the likelihood of conflicts over scare resources. There is a soupçon of Darwinian argument in this objection that, given the scarcity of resources, a violent struggle of survival pitting ethnie against ethnie, clan against clan, country against country, is unavoidable. However, this objection is not persuasive. First, resources are a function of the productive forces at hand: the weaker the productive forces, the less efficiently resources are identified and transformed to meet human needs. One could argue, in light of countries that have modernized despite scarce resources, that there is no ‘environment in-itself’, and that knowledge and labor establish the degree of its resource-richness. The “scarcity” of resources in the Horn has more to do with the weakness of productive forces than with the nature of the region’s environment. Moreover, one must recognize that there are built-in complementarities between the four zones that characterize the Horn: the highlands, the lowlands, the temperate regions in-between, and the littoral regions of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Indeed, these complementarities provide a strong material basis for a unity of the Horn.

Fifth, some may object that such a project is based on an unrealistic assumption: the Horn’s inhabitants’ capacity to free themselves from the adaptive preferences and lowered expectations they have developed as survival mechanisms in the contexts of oppression and exploitation. This pessimism betrays a forgetfulness of those moments of the Horn’s history when many have risen up to challenges that at the time also seemed beyond their means. One could, inter alia, refer to Emperor Yohanes’s resistance to foreign invasions, sacrificing his life on the battlefield; to Menilik’s defeat of the colonial designs of Italy, France and Great Britain; to Sayyid Muhammad Abdille Hasan’s inspiring struggles (1903 to 1920) against foreign domination; and to the Ethiopian Patriotic Resistance, which drew its members from almost every part of the Horn, against Fascist occupation (1936-1941). These events indicate that, despite the unfulfilled hopes of a better future gestating in these struggles, the inhabitants of the Horn have shown that they have the will and the capacity to be the authors of their own destinies. Buried in such events are collective memories of aspirations for a better world that could serve as foundations for building a democratic, just and prosperous Horn.

Finally, one may object that the inhabitants of the Horn have conflicting collective memories, and that such memories are obstacles for the creation of a unified democratic community. Such a response suffers from a monochromic conception of collective memories. Collective memories are not homogeneous. They carry within themselves contradictory webs of meanings within which we could discern not only conflicting narratives but also shared aspirations for justice, freedom and prosperity that could serve as the foundation for a “coalition of memories” for a better future. The multiple crises the new millennium inherits from the dying one could be seen, then, as challenges, indeed, as pressing invitations, to build a coalition of memories for a better world and to unveil and actualize the Horn’s shared aspirations for democracy, social justice and prosperity. To be sure, there are obstacles that stand against such efforts. They are the internal forces that generate the present crises; and overcoming these internal enemies is more demanding than defeating external ones. Nevertheless, this difficulty cannot be a sufficient reason for giving up on the task to create a democratic, just and prosperous Horn. What is at stake is our responsibility in the face of the meaningless wasting of the lives of millions of human beings.

Prima facie, then, objections to the idea of the Horn as a democratic project are not strong enough to justify rejecting it. It seems that these objections enjoy a certain currency, because we are deaf and blind to our historically shared aspirations for a free, just and prosperous Horn. Indeed, there is already a negative unity of the Horn, based on a shared history of conflicts, exploitation and oppression. Consequently, we, the inhabitants of the Horn, feel somewhat part of it without feeling fully part of it, as if we were vaguely conscious of an unfinished task – the creation of the Horn as a shared space of freedom, justice and prosperity. The alternative to this negative unity is not fragmentation, but rather the creation of a positive unity of Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti, and Eritrea, based on democracy.

The lesson of the last century is that a divided Horn is prone to conflicts. These conflicts contribute to the poverty and tyranny that blankets the region, because they create and perpetuate tensions and insecurities that tyrants such as Mengestu, Meles, Isayas, Barré, and others purposely fan and exploit in order to divert attention from the failures of their regimes by waving the scarecrows of external enemies and threats. These are used to justify the diversion of resources from the crying needs for food, health, education, and development to the military and security establishments whose main purposes are in fact to defend the tyrants in power and to serve as avenues for siphoning money into the coffers of the ruling elites. Only a democratic unity could free the inhabitants of the Horn from the self-reproducing nooses of conflicts and tyranny that now strangle them.

The Somali proverb, “The handle of the axe that cuts the tree comes from the tree,” aptly summarizes our contemporary history in that the people of the Horn have suffered more at the hands of their own compatriots than they have at the hands of all the colonial powers that have set foot in the region put together. If the Ethiopian saying that “we are what we do” were to be the measure by which our actions are judged, then we are largely responsible for the transformation of life in the Horn into endless cycles of hunger, suffering, destruction, oppression, and war. Yet, the Horn as a democratic project is not a dream. It is, to use Bloch’s expression, a “concrete utopia”, a real possibility that meanders like an Adriane thread through the long and intricate history of the Horn, waiting for the agency of its inhabitants to bring it to life. In considering what roads are available to lead the Horn towards a democratic community, we have to bear in mind the above Somali and Ethiopian sayings. They invite us to reflect on our past and to meditate on the actions we could have taken and avoided that could have preempted the present calamities. Such a meditation cannot but make us aware of how we ourselves could continue to be the main obstacles for the creation of a just, democratic and prosperous Horn of Africa and the main agents of the extension and aggravation of the present inhuman conditions for another century.

The creation of a just, democratic and prosperous Horn of Africa as a project of the New Millennium is worthy of the people of the Horn, of their as yet unfinished struggles to enhance their political, economic, social and cultural capabilities, and of their aspirations for freedom, social justice, and prosperity. It cannot but be a collective effort, requiring the comprehensive and active participation of the inhabitants of the Horn in its inception, elaboration and execution.

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1. For sources of cited items and an extended discussion of a conceptual framework that could facilitate the birth of a democratic Horn community, please refer to, Maimire Mennasemay, “The Horn Of Africa As A Democratic Project”, HORN OF AFRICA, (forthcoming).