Tseggai’s defense of Menelik and the issue of Assab
By Dr. Messay Kebede
Aug 30, 2004

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Let me begin by expressing my appreciation for Tseggai Mebrahtu’s article: “Modernization: A Poisoned Chalice for Ethiopians.” I am particularly impressed by the force with which the article confronts the ethnically inspired thesis that revels in debasing Menelik’s victory at Adwa. The article unravels scrupulously the real motives behind the bashing and exposes its ramifications, including its mortal danger to Ethiopian unity and survival. To attack Menelik’s victory is to call for the dismantling of Ethiopia through a construction of its history with colonial metaphors.

This defense does not mean that Tseggai is blind to the downside of empire-building: he denounces the mistakes of Menelik’s and Haile Selassie’s internal policies. They both failed to realize true unity because they diverted the powerful means of the modern state into the institutionalization of autocratic rule, which resulted in the weakening of Ethiopia. As Tseggai puts it, “had Menelik and Haileselassie worked for the unity and mutual respect between the various traditional elites of Ethiopia, fascist Italy might not have dared to invade Ethiopia in 1935.” His position is that it is possible to disagree with Menelik’s internal policy while approving his external policy, which succeeded in preserving Ethiopia’s independence from incomparably more powerful and greedy colonial invaders. The preservation was a prowess that all Ethiopians, including those who deplore his internal policy, must recognize. To quote Tseggai, “it must be possible to express one’s disagreement with Menelik’s internal policy without throwing out the baby with the bath water.” The statement does no more than ask Ethiopian intellectuals to give up their Manichean attitude, their all-or-nothing approach in favor a realistic, balanced, open-minded and, for that matter, more objective assessment of Ethiopian history.

I am also gratified by Tseggai’s view that such an assessment of our history is alone able to reinstate unity among Ethiopians. A balanced and realistic examination refrains from blaming one party for all of Ethiopia’s problems; it sees the positive and the negative, thus distributing blames and praises where they are due. In this regard, the theory of Amhara domination, which only succeeds in ethnicizing Ethiopian culture and history, simply confuses an autocratic regime with ethnic domination. Explaining why he rejects “the theory of Amhara national domination,” Tseggai writes: “the theory emanated from the intellectual inability to tell a domination by ethnic group from a domination by political regimes.” The kind of regime that emerged from the process of modernization is the very one that used centralization to revoke regional autonomy so that ethnic domination is only a consequence, not a real cause. Tseggai insists: Haile Selassie’s wrong policy emanates from the fact that he was “the holder of an absolute political power in Ethiopia and not because he was “Amhara”. My point is that it is the autocratic way that power has been exercised and not the ethnic identity of rulers which has been the main problem of Ethiopia.”

In other words, the ethnicization of Ethiopian politics fails to attack the real cause of the problem: instead of focusing on the need to democratize and decentralize the state, it deplores ethnic domination, thereby unleashing ethnic conflicts and propagating ethnic parties. Since these parties aspire to dominate in their turn, the preservation of the methods of the imperial state is the inevitable outcome of ethnicization. We do speak of TPLF or Tigrean domination and consider the federal structure as nothing more than a smokescreen.

The adoption of a balanced and unbiased approach to Ethiopian history alone paves the way to reconciliation. It frees us from ethnicization by bringing out the real causes of Ethiopian predicaments. Only when we understand to what extent Ethiopian modernization was conditioned by forces and circumstances over which Ethiopians had little control do we realize that they were more victims than beneficiaries. No sooner do Ethiopians feel victimized than they tend to close ranks and work toward the resurrection of their unity. When this happens, the reading of Ethiopian history as ethnic conspiracy is replaced by the solidarity of the victims. Put otherwise, Tseggai’s “conviction that Ethiopia can never resurrect unless her political elites do everything possible for national reconciliation by saying that bygones are bygones” is set in motion.

Interestingly, Tseggai’s principle of reconciliation, that is, the ability to see the positive and the negative in a given policy, sets the stage for the overcoming of the disagreement we had over the issue of Assab. In an article titled, “Assab or How to Make the best of a Predicament,” I have argued that the wise policy to pursue is to let Assab go, as Ethiopia is in no position to engage in a new prolonged war against Eritrea. My contention was that Ethiopia is facing a choice: either to occupy Assab by force with the consequence of generating a new round of war that will absorb its resources or sacrifice Assab to achieve a greater good, namely, the survival of Ethiopia. The worst enemy of our country is ethnicization and the only way to defuse its impact is to achieve some level of economic success. Such a success, however modest, will invite people to have a stake in the integrity of the country. What was clear to me was that a prolonged war against Eritrea would only intensify our economic decline whose outcome could not be anything other than the solidification of ethnic fragmentation.

It springs to mind that my reasoning is similar to the one that Menelik used to let Eritrea go. I say this without any pretension, given the fact that my attempt to understand Menelik’s position has impacted on my analysis of the Ethiopian dilemma over Assab. For those readers who desire to verify my statement, I ask them to refer to my book Survival and Modernization: Ethiopia’s Enigmatic Present (pp. 48-51), written in 1999. In that book, I argue that the decision to chase Italians out of Eritrea, which was military possible, would undermine Menelik’s hard-won victory and endanger Ethiopian independence. This is exactly how Tseggai defends Menelik’s resignation to the Italian occupation of Eritrea when he maintains that he “was duressed into signing the unequal pseudo-colonial treaties.”

My concession does not mean that I recognize the Eritrean ownership of Assab, any more than Menelik had acknowledged the Italian rule over Eritrea. Rather, it admits that circumstances emerge when one has to make a choice and that the best choice is the one that sacrifices the least to secure the greater cause. When circumstances change, the sacrifice, then consented, can resurrect as a claim. That is why my article urged the Eritrean leadership to cede the port to the Ethiopian control in exchange for some compensation. The wisdom of this approach is vindicated by the fact that Haile Selassie was able to recover Eritrea-even though he lost it because of an ill-advised policy of integration.

What is one to conclude if not that Tseggai’s crusade against Manichaeism, which is itself the result of the rigid absorption of Marxist-Leninist ideology, is indeed the only path to reconciliation and national unity? One-sidedness and polarization blocks the understanding of our history. The construction of our history only in terms of oppressor and oppressed as a result of ethnicization is a case in point. Tseggai thinks that there is another way of construing our history, which is not only more sensitive to the complexity of that history, but also draws Ethiopians together instead of pushing them apart. Because we polarize our history, now on the basis of class conflicts, now on ethnic grounds, the Ethiopian discourse breaks down into a series of cacophony that is intelligible only to exclusive groups. As Tseggai says: “It is high time that we emerge from our ethnic cocoon.”

Some such plea encourages me to pursue my dialogue with Tseggai, not for the purpose of defeating his position, but for the much greater objective of achieving the mutual consideration that leads us to view our different positions more as legitimate alternatives than as dictates. Under this practice, the intellectual elite no longer decides what is right or wrong; its task is to develop arguments in favor of competing positions that are presented as alternatives to the only deciding body, namely, the people