Tsehai Publishers International Journal of Ethiopian Studies

Ethiopian Political Theory, Democracy, and Surplus History
Author(s): Maimire Mennasemay

Source: International Journal of Ethiopian Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1/2 (Summer/Fall 2005-
2006), pp. 1-32
Published by: Tsehai Publishers
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27828854
Accessed: 15-05-2020 12:54 UTC
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Ethiopian Political Theory,
Democracy, and Surplus History
Maimire Mennasemay
The issue of tabula rasa theorizing in Ethiopian studies is considered through an

examination of Ethiopian political thinking and practices. The article argues that a
conception of history that includes its 'surplus "is the condition ofpossibilityfor developing
categories of political understanding that could make freedom and social justice the
axioms of Ethiopian politics. It enucleates from within Ethiopian history an interrelated
set of concepts?surplus-history, yetarikawi merdo or historical merdo, yetarikawi adera
or anamnestic solidarity, hizb or people as a political concept, and sem ena werk (wax and
gold) politics?to demonstrate that Ethiopian history is deep, rich and complex enough
to generate categories of political understanding that link it with the universal values of
freedom, equality and social justice. It concludes with an examination of the need for
Ethiopian political theory to integrate into common discourse the values and ideas of
democracy through an interpretative appropriation of past and present Ethiopian social
practices so that a political culture could emerge that would make democratic values the
axioms of Ethiopian politics.
Some Issues in Ethiopian Political Theory
From the 1974 Revolution to the collapse of the Derg in 1991, Ethiopia
was wracked with disastrous political and economic crises. In 1991, the
victorious Tigrean People's Liberation Front (TPLF) organized Ethiopia
into a federation of ethnicstans which it ruled under the cover of a coalition
of ethnic parties of its own creation?the Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary
Democratic Front (EPRDF). The 1994 Constitution consolidated ethnicity as
the fundamental principle of the political and territorial organization of the
country.1 Throughout all this period, millions of Ethiopians were victims of
famine and malnutrition.
One would have thought that the endemic famine and political crises
would trigger an internal critical reflection on the ideas and ideals that could
help Ethiopians construct a better society. But with the exception of our
literature, which explored the failures and frailties, the hopes and despairs, of
The International Journal of Ethiopian Studies (ISSN: 1543-4133) is published two times a year by
Tsehai Publishers, P. O. Box: 1881, Hollywood, CA 90078. Copyright ? 2005. Volume II, Number 1&2.
2 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ETHIOPIAN STUDIES
Ethiopian men and women coping with the harsh environment of a soci
in turmoil,2 Ethiopian intellectual life became captive to what Triulzi c
"historiographical simplification" founded on "a strenuously defended 'm
ethnicity/ which tended to isolate each community within its own cult
and linguistic bounds."3 The result was tabula rasa or ahistorical theorizin
Ethiopian politics.
In this essay, I will discuss how tabula rasa theorizing has impoverish
Ethiopian political thinking and develop a number of ideas to show the
for an Ethiopian political theory rooted in Ethiopian history. To do so, I
enucleate from within Ethiopian history an interrelated set of concepts?surpl
history, yetarikawi merdo or historical merdo, yetarikawi adera or anamn
solidarity, hizb or people as a political concept, and sem ena werk (wax
gold) politics?to demonstrate that Ethiopian history is deep, rich and com
enough to generate categories of political understanding that link it with
universal dimensions of democracy. I will conclude with a consideration
the need for Ethiopian political theory to indigenize the universal values
ideas of democracy through an interpretative re-appropriation of the meanin
constitutive of Ethiopian social practices so that a political culture could emer
that would make freedom and social justice the axioms of Ethiopian politi
Tabula Rasa Theorizing and Pr?t ? Porter Knowledge
Let me start with an obvious claim that knowledge is one of the necess
conditions for extricating Ethiopia from poverty and oppression. But, in l
of Ethiopia's conditions, one must ask: What kind of knowledge?
Despite the billions of dollars of foreign aid, the thousands of foreig
advisors who worked in almost every area of the economy and governme
and the generous borrowings of knowledge from the West, Ethiopia is
one of the poorest countries on the planet.4 One may wonder why
knowledge, beneficial in the West, failed in Ethiopia. One reason relates to
way Ethiopians appropriate this knowledge. For Westerners, this knowle
expresses the results of their own efforts to see more clearly into the opaciti
and obstacles generated by their social practices. But when Ethiopi
borrow this knowledge without critically mediating it through their historica
experiences and the intersubjective meanings constitutive of their so
practices,5 it brings with it alien presuppositions which lead to policies t
fail to cash into Ethiopia's social realities. Worse, it generates policies th
distort these social realities such that development in Ethiopia comes to m
undoing the maldevelopment these policies have generated, in additio
solving the problems they were supposed to resolve in the first place. This do
not mean that knowledge developed in the West is irrelevant to Ethiopia.
ETHIOPIAN POLITICAL THEORY, DEMOCRACY AND SURPLUS HISTORY 3
relativism that considers Western knowledge as inherently ethnocentric must

be rejected.6 The real problem is that rather than conceive knowledge as a way
of active self-understanding and as a social practice that engages Ethiopian
society from within, Ethiopians have embraced a conception of knowledge as
a disparate collection of borrowed pr?t ? porter tools that posits Ethiopia as a
blank slate.
Moreover, given the high volume of knowledge Westerners have produced

on Ethiopia, one is forced to ask why this particular knowledge has not
contributed to a constructive transformation of Ethiopian society. The
failure of this knowledge could be traced also to its condition of production.
The knowledge created by the West from studying non-Western societies is
implicitly or explicitly comparative, because there is no "view from nowhere"
which gives one an "objective" understanding of the other on the model of the
natural sciences.7 This knowledge is produced within the historical horizon of
the West and contributes more to the West's self-understanding by using other
societies as a foil for rediscovering itself in a new light rather than to the self
understanding of Ethiopian society.
Consider Donald Levine's study of Ethiopian culture. He claims that the

"Amhara" have "a preoccupation with private interests that leaves little room
for the consideration of communal needs"; that "there is little spontaneous
co-operation in Amhara life"; that "Aggressiveness is further encouraged by
the Amhara ego ideal"; that "Argumentation, litigation, insulting, and revenge
comprise the hard core (sic) of social interaction among Amhara"; and that
"the most characteristic form of interaction among the Amhara is that of
domination."8 That one could make such generalizations about a centuries-old
culture practiced by millions of people is perplexing. But it is comprehensible if
one places it in the history of the West's quest of comparative self-understanding
since at least the Enlightenment's idea of the noble savage.9 The author reads
Ethiopian culture anamorphically,10 and generates surplus knowledge that
illuminates his society from a new perspective,11 while leaving Ethiopian self
understanding even more opaque.
Though such studies add to the West's self-understanding through the use
of others as a mirror without a crack in the tain, for Ethiopians, it is a mirror
without tain,12 for it does not allow them to see clearly the adversities that have
persistently prevented them from overcoming poverty and oppression. Indeed,
the comparative dimension is not fully available to Ethiopians as a source of
self-understanding insofar as their knowledge of Western societies is not the
result of what Ethiopians have discovered about the West but rather of what
Westerners have produced as knowledge of themselves. Ethiopians know about
the West what the West tells them about itself. Though Ethiopians borrow a
lot from the West, we could say that Ethiopians do not know the West well
enough to develop a comparative knowledge of themselves. In this

reflecting on Ethiopian politics based on borrowed theories cannot
to a tabula rasa theorizing that excludes the meanings and social prac
constitute who Ethiopians are.
It is not surprising then that, since 1974, the revolutions and reform
have cascaded on Ethiopians are reflected in modern Ethiopian lite
events that make Ethiopians strangers to their own history and soc
overcome this radical lack of political self-understanding, Ethiopia
a political theory rooted in a critical appropriation of their histor
of formulating political questions and answers in ways that posit Et
as active historical agents rather than as mere recipients of the in
and material productions of others. To argue this point, I will first
the concept of surplus-history in order to throw light on the cond
possibility of Ethiopian politics. I will then consider why conte
Ethiopian political theory must take into account surplus-history,
provide the ideas and norms necessary for resolving the intertwined
of poverty and tyranny.
Surplus-history
At the confluence of African and Middle Eastern civilizations, m

of highlands and deserts, inhabited by a population of diverse cult
languages, and home to Christianity and Islam, Ethiopia has been a
is history's laboratory, the locus of still on-going political experime
outcomes are still uncertain. From the Axumite period onwards, the
construction of Ethiopia took place through complex disintegr
integrative processes, triggered by the various interactions of social for
ethnies. The decline of Axsum and the wars of Gudit in the tenth
triggered a disintegrative process out of which emerged the Zagwe
produced the unique works of Lalibella. The wars of Imam Ahmad
(1527-1543), though destructive, initiated nevertheless integrative
that added one more dimension to the emerging complex Ethiopian iden
making Islam an integral component of Ethiopian society. At the sam
the Gragn wars prepared the ground for the Oromo-Amhara confrontat
integration. During the Zemene Mesafmt (1769-1853), the conflict
the Tigrean, Gondare, and Yeju Oromo nobilities reduced the Ethiop
to shambles, and yet this disintegration of the old order gave rise to
reconstruction of the Ethiopian state, led by Tewedros, Yohannes, and M
culminating in Haile Selassie's centralization of power.14 The new e
emerged from these contradictory processes in turn sought in 1960
coup d"?tat), 1974, 1989 (aborted coup d"?tat), to redefine Ethiopian
giving rise in 1991 to political ethnicity. This in turn triggered the rise of pan
ethnic movements such as the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) and
the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces (UEDF).15
I would like to name "surplus-history" the non-actualized excess meanings
and effects secreted by the multitude of decisions, actions and events that are
constitutive of the diverse integrative and disintegrative political, social, and
economic processes from which emerges Ethiopian history. Surplus-history is
that which, in these decisions, actions and events, is "more" than the decisions,
actions and events themselves, but slides under them and disappears from the
public realm of significations: It is the tacit and unarticulated remainder of the
visible effects and accepted meanings of decisions, actions and events. These
surplus meanings and effects silently weave, without the actors of the actions
and events being aware of them, surplus-history: the tectonic plate, as it were,
out of which eventually emerge new identities, motivations, relations, conflicts,
and alternatives. An inter-ethnic or inter-religious marriage, a migration to
another region, a religious conversion, the refusal of a farmer to pay taxes, a
social or political conflict, a lone stand against oppression, an official's decision,
an institution's action or lack of it, a government policy, a peasant uprising, a
student protest, a strike, a police action, and so forth, that, at the moment
of their happening, seem to have only a temporally or a spatially, a socially
or a politically, or a personally or an ethnically circumscribed significance,
tacitly secrete streams of surplus meanings and effects that form a polyphonic
subterranean ocean whose movements generate new forces, identities, relations,
and ideas that mature imperceptibly and burst to the surface unexpectedly-thus,
the surprisingly swift demise of the Imperial regime; the overnight collapse of
the Derg despite its gigantic war machine and security services; the totally
unexpected irruption of ethnic politics in 1991; and the equally unexpected
victory of the democratic forces at the May 2005 elections.
Surplus-history is the imperceptible realm where the possible consequences

of the excluded, occluded, repressed, unrecognized or forgotten surplus
meanings and non-actualized effects intermingle; it gives birth to new forms
that mature tacitly and slowly, anticipating and tracing the possible social and
political paths and alternatives for the future. Surplus-history is both external
and internal to Ethiopian politics in that it is its condition of possibility as well
as the ultimate source of its raw political and social material. It harbors the
multiform and complex social and political contradictions, interests, conflicts,
choices and identities out of which Ethiopians extract those possibilities that; in
the specific conditions in which they act, are accessible to them as the horizon
and the raw material of their new social practices and political actions.
Against the disembodied, ahistorical and passive self that tabula rasa
theorizing imposes on Ethiopians, surplus-history draws our attention to
Ethiopians as the active creators of the meanings and effects that constitute
condition of possibility of, to borrow Lefort's terminology, the "politic
well as of "politics" in Ethiopia. 16 The distinction that Claude Lefort m
between the political ("le politique") and politics ("la politique") throws
light on the nature of surplus-history. According to Lefort, "the politic
the condition of possibility of "politics", that is, of rules, institutions, polic
and so forth. I would like to modify the relations between these two to
the role of surplus-history in Ethiopian political life. Politics ("la politiq
one of the many sources of the surplus meanings and effects that feed surp
history. On the other hand, surplus-history is the condition that makes pos
the political ("le politique") out of which Ethiopians make their politic
politique"). Surplus-history, as the reservoir of non-actualized meaning
effects, bears within itself all the possible forms, hopes and horizons of Eth
politics. As thus, it is the ground of all the historically possible regimes and
such, shows the contingency?the incompleteness and changeability?of
and every Ethiopian regime. That is, surplus-history makes possible a ri
complex conception of Ethiopians as active agents that produce the elem
processes, contexts and institutions of their political life; it indicates th
adequate understanding of Ethiopian political life is impossible unless
grasped from within the meanings and social practices that constitute it.
Surplus-history, fed continuously with the multifarious non-actua

meanings and effects secreted by the constant streams of decisions, actio
events? scrambles ideas, identities and relations. One of the consequ
of this silent intermingling and work of surplus meanings and effects
dissolution of fixed meaning-boundaries and the emergence of fluid iden
that create the condition of possibility of composite identities and mu
dimensional social and political relations. The non-actualized meanings
effects that constitute surplus-history tacitly overflow the individuals, gro
and ethnies whose diverse activities and interactions bring surplus history int
surreptitious existence. These boundary-effacing effects instigate the event
breakdown of the coincidence between ascriptive categories and identitie
as between ethnicity and identity, or between religion and identity. As a
of movement and heterogeneity that is in constant ebullition, surplus-h
slowly generates meanings, hopes and effects that eventually mature and br
though the normal course of events. It ushers new social and political qu
points that, among other things, loosen social and political self-definitions f
the fetters of closed identities, generating porous and composite identi
laying the ground for the constitution of commonly shared space and inter
and leading to the emergence of pan-ethnic regions. Wollo, Shoa, and H
are the paradigmatic examples of this kind of transformation.17
In Ethiopia, the collapse of the coincidence between ethnic category a

identity exposed the problems of political scarcity (absence of democracy
and economic scarcity (absence of social justice), making the break betwe
ethnicity and identity the trigger that started off the modern struggle
emancipation in Tigray (1943), Bale (1963, 1970) Gojam (1969), the urb
centers (1974), culminating in the triumph of the EPRDF (1991), and
sudden irruption of non-ethnic democratic forces in 2005. This disjunctio
of identity from ethnic category carried within itself many possibilities one of
which is a transition to democracy based on the recognition of the autonom
of the individual, who, in Ethiopia, has already emerged through the wor
of surplus-history,18 while the other possibility is the rise of a new type of se
definition rooted in ethnic voluntarism; that is, the deliberate reconstruction o
a fixed ethnic identity in a context of fluid ethnicity and composite identities.
Ethnic voluntarism is the ideology of those, such as the current leaders o
the EPRDF, that surplus-history has liberated from the fusion of identity
ethnicity, and who, as a response to political and economic scarcity, constr
and instrumentalize hard ethnic identities as a weapon for appropriating po
in the name of "ethnic lib?ration".
What this means is that the work of surplus-history creates, slowly bu

inevitably, new demands and contradictions that overflow specific identiti
and interests such that the institutions within which the specific identit
and interests developed cannot accommodate them, leading to the rise
new disintegrative and integrative forces. This does not imply that surpl
history has a pre-determined end. Surplus-history is driven by the tacit
non-actualized meanings and effects of the decisions and actions of, amon
others, individuals who, even in a traditional society such as Ethiopia, ma
decisions in their particular contexts of uncertainty, even if under tyrann
These particular decisions, though embedded in a network of oppression,
in an important sense the decisions of free agents. However, this freedom
unable to actualize itself as the public effect of the decisions and actions o
Ethiopians, silently escapes the network of oppression that constrains the
and feeds and animates the realm of non-actualized meanings and effects t
are constitutive of surplus-history. In other words, the moving force of surplu
history is the freedom that is the unrecognized and repressed core of every
decisions and actions, their remainder, as it were, making surplus-history
powerful reservoir of the forces opposed to tyranny. Recognizing surplus
history thus opens the door to the recognition of Ethiopians as active subje
and offers a richer understanding of Ethiopian politics and of its potenti
for democracy and social justice; whereas neglecting it leads to tabula r
theorizing, with all its destructive outcomes.
Ethiopia: A Colonial State or A Composite Nation?
One of the conclusions of tabula rasa theorizing on Ethiopian politics is

that Ethiopia was formed as a colonial state.19 In the context of tabula ra
theorizing, Ethiopia's past appears as a collection of events with no discernab
meaningful connections amongst them. What is available for us then is on
a spontaneous historical consciousness of disparate events, inviting arbitrar
definitions of the meaning of the past and making possible the arbitrary
borrowing of exocentric theories. Under the Derg, this led to the impositio
of communism, and, under the EPRDF, to a conception of Ethiopia a
a colonial power, which led to the separation of Eritrea and to the right o
ethnic secession based on the premise that each ethnie is a colonized group
that must be liberated. The Derg and its communism imploded in 1991. Th
second borrowed theory, colonialism, however, is now enshrined in the 199
Constitution and the policies of the EPRDF government.20 It is thus of interest
to examine it briefly to show the distorting effects of the tabula rasa theorizin
embodied in the colonial thesis borrowed from Marxism.
The problem in depicting Ethiopia as a colonial state is that the Marxist

concept of colonialism is derived from the logic of capitalist reproduction
whereas traditional Ethiopia is not a capitalist society. Because of this hiatus
the adepts of the colonial thesis apply the Ptolemaic method of saving the
phenomenon and add epicycles to the Marxist theory of colonialism until
Ethiopian reality fits the borrowed theory. Conflating differing historica
processes, Addis Hiwet writes that "The same historical forces that create
the Gold Coast, the Ivory Coast, the Sudan and Kenya were the very ones
that created modern Ethiopia"; and he adds: "the conceptual tool that best
describes the whole social-economic structure" of Ethiopia is "military
feudal-colonialism."21 This conceptual tool of military-feudal-colonialism i
an epicycle added to Marxist theory, and the term feudal conveniently conflates
the differing European and Ethiopian histories of land ownership. These tw
rhetorical moves reduce aspects of Ethiopian history to metonyms of Wester
colonial history in order to generate a Marxist theory that is tailor-made t
describe the formation of the Ethiopian state as a colonial enterprise. But what
this colonial theory fails to explain is Ethiopia's capacity to define its historical
space from within.
The 19th century consolidation of the Ethiopian state is not a miracle. It

is the outcome of centuries of surplus-history that has in contradictory way
created the pre-conditions of the political, demographic, economic, religiou
and cultural interconnections. In the preceding centuries, the overlap betwee
Ethiopia's historical space and the space of the state?the area over whi
it imposed its institutional powers?was a function of internal conflicts an
external aggressions; consequently, the reach of the physical force of

has always been in constant flux.22 Throughout the periods of expan
contraction of the state, however, factors other than physical force?c
economic, social, religious, political, demographic interconn
gradually emerging from the works of surplus-history, have been c
the generation of a shared historical space. An illustration of this asp
colonial theory cannot account for, is the gradual unmooring of ind
identity from mono-ethnic categories.
Before the introduction of ethnic politics in 1991, Ethiopian

relatively little political weight to issues of ethnic origins," notes C
and unlike other African countries where "a politician's ethnic or
part of the social and political equipment he carries around with him
"often difficult if not impossible to place in ethnic terms" Ethiopian
and politicians.23 From the perspective of surplus-history, one can exp
benign indifference to ethnic origin. In some sense, every empirical
contains something non-Amhara, every empirical Oromo contains so
non-Oromo, and so forth, the "something" covering anything from th
to the cultural, scrambled through surplus-history. From this persp
Ethiopia is neither an aggregation of ethnies nor a homogeneous natio
composite nation of overlapping identities, a commonly shared space
the basis of politics has moved from shared ethnicity to shared pan-ethni
Not recognizing surplus-history leads to the two interrelated pro

current Ethiopian political thinking: nation-centrism and ethno-centr
nationalist discourse forgets that Ethiopia is a composite nation forged
the multifarious processes of integration and disintegration, and depi
as a nation that has come on the historical scene fully formed. On t
hand, the ethnie-ctnttrtd discourse claims that Ethiopia is not "a hist
constituted society" and depicts her as "a conglomeration of diverse
linguistic, cultural and religious groups brought together and largely dom
by force,"24 echoing curiously Hegel's assertion that "In...Africa, histo
fact out of the question."25 But this ethno-centric reading fails to illumin
dynamics of Ethiopian politics. It makes incomprehensible why rival E
social forces put aside their deep differences and fought together aga
Italian invasion in 1896. It does not explain the pan-ethnic resistance
1936 Fascist occupation, nor the electoral success of the pan-ethnic pa
the 2005 national elections, despite 14 years of ethnic politics.26
To show the falsity of the colonial thesis is not, however, to deny the
Ethiopian rulers have inflicted on the people. However, how these ha
understood and their causes conceptualized have implications for
of political actions that are required to overcome the consequences o
harms. The colonial thesis, premised on "historiographical simplificat
distorts our understanding of the past and sows the seeds of political turmoil
while diverting our attention from an important issue generated through
surplus-history: the transition from ethnic to political diversity. I will discuss
this through a brief consideration of the Oromo-Amhara interrelations, which
are currently reduced to colonial relations to elide over the failure of tabula rasa
theorizing to explain the Oromo-Amhara symbiosis that is behind the rise of
twentieth century Ethiopia.
Surplus-history and the Transition from Ethnic Diversity to Political diversity
Colonialism's distinguishing feature is the social, political, and economic

exclusion of the colonized as the basis for the organization of political and
socio-economic life, symbolized by the quintessentially colonial practice?
racial segregation.27 Does this describe Oromo-Amhara interrelations?
To start with, the Oromo and the Amhara share, for the most part, the
same geographical and historical space. An Oromo nationalist historian writes
that "In order to create cultural and perceptual differences among the Oromo,
the colonial government divided them into ten regions: Wallo, Shoa, Hararge,
Bale, Arsi, Sidamo, Gamu Gofa, Ilubabor, Wallaga and Kaffa. Furthermore it
incorporated some Oromo into Gojam and Tigray to destroy their identity by
isolating them from their own people."28 But what this statement acknowledges,
when shorn off of its tabula rasa theorizing-based premise of colonialism,
is that the two groups share the same geographical-historical space. Not
surprisingly, these two groups have developed innumerable intermeshing
cultural, political, economic, personal relationships such that in many cases it
is difficult to establish clear cultural and demographic boundaries between the
two. The Oromo language was from 1769 to 1855 a court language in Gondar.
During the same period, the Oromo elite were the king-makers in Gondar.
The intermarriages between the Amhara and the Oromo, both among elites
and commoners, were and are still extensive. As Clapham notes, the Imperial
family has a pan-ethnic identity for it "is now genealogically more Galla (sic)
than Amhara, and there are few members of the Shoa nobility who have no
Galla (sic) blood....At least in Shoa, where the process of assimilation has
gone furthest, it is therefore impossible to make any clear division between
the two groups."29 As Paul Henze points out, Shoan leaders, "like Shoa itself,
had a strong strain of Oromo blood....Shoa's dynamism may be attributable
in part to its amalgam of ethnic groups with varying traditions." 30 Indeed,
thousands of Amhara, from nobles to peasants, served loyally Oromo ministers
and generals, and vice versa.31 It is this Oromo-Amhara symbiosis that made
possible Menelik's anti-colonial victory in 1896 and facilitated the birth of
modern Ethiopia.32 No similar demographic, social, cultural and political
11
ETHIOPIAN POLITICAL THEORY, DEMOCRACY AND SURPLUS HISTORY
intertwining has taken place between European powers and their colonial
subjects; indeed, it cannot place under the colonial system.
Besides indicating the radical inadequacy of the colonial thesis, what this
brief comparison raises is the following question: How does one determine
ethnic diversity within the Ethiopian context where ethnicity is no longer
the limit of one's social self-definition, and where power relations have been
displaced from ethnic to pan-ethnic grounds? The only way this could be
done is through "historiographical simplification." History is replaced by
anthropology, and arbitrary decisions are made to make ethnicity a complete
social identity.33 The result is the conflation of ethnic and political diversity,
institutionalized in the current ethnic federation as a system that substitutes
ethnic elites for the people. Though the regime claims to promote "unity
in diversity,"34 its doctrine of ethnic corporatism, enshrined in its founding
documents,35 gives primacy to ethnic diversity over unity, and thus undermines
the very condition?democratic representation?necessary for unity, by
transforming elections into an engine of substitutionalism. In the context of a
composite nation, this conflation of ethnic and political diversity raises serious
theoretical and political problems.
Substitutionalism vs Democratic Representation
In exposing the miscognition involved in considering Ethiopia either as

a nation fully formed from its inception or as a collection of homogeneous
ethnies, surplus-history draws our attention to the dynamic nature of diversity
in Ethiopia. From this perspective, diversity has no value in itself. Which
kind of diversity is valuable requires evaluative criteria external to diversity.
Politically, diversity is valued only when it contributes to the deepening of
the universal norms of democracy. Second, it is not clear that ethnic diversity
implies separation, for there could be, as the work of surplus-history shows,
ethnic interactions that create pan-ethnic identities, raising the disconcerting
question of how to deal with composite identities within the framework of
politically fixed ethnicities and ethnic boundaries. Third, the move from ethnic
to pan-ethnic grounding of political power that the work of surplus-history has
effected implies that political power is better territorialized on a regional than
on an ethnic basis. The history that created Ethiopians as a people is also the
history that generated the conditions of their oppression and poverty, making
these problems overflow ethnicity and local conditions for understanding and
resolving them. Fourth, to equate ethnic diversity with political diversity?
that each ethnie should have its own political organization?is to make
anthropological classifications the basis of politics, a practice historically
associated with racism.36 Finally, making ethnic diversity the horizon of politics
gives primacy to diversity over unity, making the idea of unity in diversity self
contradictory, for, diversity is recognizable only within a prior framework of
unity. When diversity has priority over unity, the latter is at best a transitional
arrangement, as it is indeed implied by article 39 of the Constitution. To
achieve "unity in diversity," one needs to go beyond ethnic diversity, which is
an empirical matter, and develop a political conception of diversity that goes
beyond empirical divisions such as ethnicity, gender, and so forth.
Unlike ethnicity, politics creates a framework of unity that cuts across

class, gender, ethnic and other diversities. From the democratic perspective,
political diversity refers to the different ways universal political principles such
as freedom, equality, social justice, and so forth, are translated into practice.
Liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and variations of these, are the diverse
political forms that embody these universal principles. From the universalist
perspective, that is, from the perspective of human emancipation, ethnicity is,
like gender and class, ontologically secondary in that it cannot offer universal
criteria of inclusion and could not therefore be the foundation of a democratic
polity. To move from ethnic diversity, an anthropological datum, to political
diversity, a sphere of universal norms, one needs ethnie-ntuXxdX political parties,
differing from each other in their political orientations, but each espousing
universalistic political norms of inclusion. Each party then will be capable
of mediating between the particularisms of ethnicity, class, and so forth,
and the universalism of politics. Such meta-ethnic institutions, to which any
Ethiopian could adhere, create a commonly shared public sphere enabling the
articulation of ethnic diversity with political unity in a way that recognizes the
fluidity of ethnic diversity. This kind of universality is of course impossible
with ethnic political parties, because membership in these parties is based on
ascriptive criterion.37 The politicization of ethnic identity thus creates obstacles
to both democracy and unity, for it replaces democratic representation with
substitutionalism?that is, the assumption of a total identity between a person
and his or her ethnie such that the "ethnic leader" becomes a substitute for his
or her ethnie..
Substitutionalism is founded on ethnic corporatism. It assumes that the

interests of the ethnic elite is identical with that of the ethnie and replaces the
democratic representation of the people with the substitution of the elites for
their respective ethnies. Thus the universal question of political and economic
emancipation, which overflows ethnic boundaries and identities, is eliminated
and replaced with the question of sharing power among ethnic elites in the
name of ethnic self-determination.
In embracing substitutionalism in lieu of democratic representation as a

mechanismforarticulatinginterestsandallocatingpowers,thel994Constitution
has recreated the poverty and oppression-generating system of the past in a
new form, i.e., as a federalism organized on the basis of ethnic corporatism

and substitutionalism. Given the fundamental difference between the
presupposition of democratic representation?individual autonomy?and the
presupposition of substitutionalism?ethnic corporatism?as well as the basic
difference in the political ideals these two pursue?the primacy of individual
free choice for the former, and the primacy of ethnic-constrained choice for the
latter?the democratic opposition's claim that the 1994 Constitution has to be
changed in order for democracy to exist is justified, because substitutionalism
and democratic representation are incompatible.38 Indeed the political crisis
surrounding the May 2005 elections was inevitable insofar as the EPRDF
regime's conception of elections as a mechanism for maintaining its system
of substitutionalism clashed head-on with the opposition's understanding of
election as freely choosing one's representative. It is the successful effort of
the democratic opposition to make the 2005 elections a process of democratic
representation that tore away the "democratic" fig leaf that the EPRDF has
more or less successfully used in 1995 and 2000 to hide its anti-democratic use
of elections as a mechanism of substitutionalism. Faced with a democratically
sanctioned defeat, the regime resorted to fraud and force to maintain itself in
power.39
What the unexpected outcome of the May 2005 elections shows is that the
silent, subterranean work of surplus-history has already led to the maturation
of the universal ideals of democracy within Ethiopian social practices
themselves. Thus the possibility of a democratic alternative to substitutionalism
and tyranny is not something Ethiopians have to import. Rather the conditions
of possibility of democracy are already present in the possible but non-realized
meanings and effects of the multitude of decisions, actions and interactions
that have generated diverse political trajectories in Ethiopian history.
Surplus-history and Political Trajectories in Ethiopian History
Within the political history of Ethiopia, one finds diverse political

trajectories, reflecting the works of surplus-history. These could be classified
for analytical purposes as the centralization, fragmentation, and integration
currents.40 This classification is meant to offer a kind of ideal-types for analytical
purposes, for in reality, Ethiopian history is characterized by the imbrications
of these different currents.
The centralization current is incarnated in the effort to concentrate political

power at the centre. Tewedros (1847-1868), probably the first emperor who
engaged on this path, tried to subjugate all the sources of power, including the
Church, and failed. This centralizing thread was picked up by Haile Selassie
(1930-1974) who stripped the regions of their traditional autonomy and reigned
as an absolute monarch. The Derg (1974-1991) intensified this centralization.

Not surprisingly, Ethiopians have invariably resisted centralization and its
drive to homogenize the composite identities and the regional specificities
formed through the works of surplus-history. The calm during Haile Selassie's
rule does contrast with the turmoil under Tewedros and the Derg, but it is a
misleading calm, for revolts took place under his regime in Tigray, Gojam,
Bale, and Eritrea.41
The fragmentation current could be identified with the period of the Zagwe
dynasty (1140-1270), the campaigns of Imam Ahmed (1527-1543), the Zemene
Mesafint (1769-1853), and the EPRDF regime (1991- ). The fragmentation
current is a reaction to the monopolization of power characteristic of the
centralization current. In rejecting the concentration of power at the centre,
the fragmentation current resorts to exclusive criteria of political organization
such as ethnicity and thus denies the integrative transformations that surplus
history has performed; it tends to consider differences between Ethiopians as
more important than what they have come to share historically. This reaction
is at the root of the TPLF's claim that "Even though it is undeniable that the
oppressed masses of the Amhara nationality itself do not play a major role in
the oppression of the Tigrayan masses the two peoples have developed bitter
hatred (sic) towards each other."42
However, in resorting to an exclusive criterion of political organization as a

remedy to the concentration of power at the centre, the fragmentation current
goes against the historically created composite identities and unleashes new
forces that try to overcome both the fragmentation current and the politics of
exclusion which triggered it. Such a backlash is what emerged in the May 15,
2005 elections. The leaders of the EPRDF raised the specter of an Ethiopian
Interhamwe,43 hoping to frighten the electorate into voting for their ethnically
organized party, the EPRDF. But the forces made-up of pan-ethnic parties
made a spectacular breakthrough.44
The integration current characterizes the Middle period or from Amde

Tseyon to Zara Yakob (1314-1468), and the periods of Yohannes (1872-1889)
and Menelik (1865-1913). It differs from the centralization current in that its
objective is unity rather than centralization of power, recognition of regional
autonomy rather than the dictatorship of the centre. The integration trajectory
reflects one of the effects of surplus-history: the historical emergence of
Ethiopia as a composite nation of pan-ethnic identities and regions. It is thus
region-oriented rather than ethnie-focused. Historically, the integration current
functioned as if Ethiopia were a feudal federation. In the integration current,
the Neguse Negest, literally the King of Kings, dealt with national matters,
whereas the kings dealt with their regional issues. What the King of Kings
expected from the regional leaders was political loyalty and contributions
to the national treasury and war efforts. For the rest, a kind of subsidiarity
principle functioned throughout the kingdom. According to Quirin, the "typical
technique of provincial rule in Ethiopia... has been the classic "indirect rule,"
whenever local elites could be found who would agree?sometimes after and
always involving the threat of military force?to cooperate with the central
government."45
But to reduce this practice of subsidiarity to indirect rule, misses the
uniqueness of Ethiopian politics. This misinterpretation arises from an
ahistorical understanding of the concept of military force. The Western
concept of military force exists in a semantic and historical field that makes a
distinction between military and police forces and legitimates the use of police
force to maintain internal security while reserving the use of military force
against external enemies. But in pre-modern Ethiopia, there was no distinction
between military and police forces. The same force was used to maintain
internal security and to defend the nation against external enemies. If one does
not take into account this historical difference in the meaning of military force,
one risks reducing every internal security activity in pre-modern Ethiopia to a
military action as understood in the Western sense.
But once this historical difference in the concept of military force is
recognized, one has to take into account the kind of interrelations?for
example, the practice of marriage arrangements between members of the
central and regional elites for creating political alliances?that are involved
in what Quirin calls indirect rule. Unlike the British practice of indirect rule
which was premised on physical, cultural and ethnic separation between the
colonizers and the colonized, what Quirin calls indirect rue is based on political
and social interp?n?trations inscribed in the rise of pan-ethnic identities and
regions, and the development of Ethiopia as a composite nation. But, politically,
despite its attractions, the integrative current has often been crowded out by the
other two. The main reason for this is the non-recognition of the effects of the
dark side of surplus-history, and, consequently, the inability of Ethiopians to
cope with it.
Yetarikawi Merdo or the Historical Merdo
Ethiopian history, like the history of all state-building, is partly a history of

violence, conquest and domination. Since the way we perceive historical events
influences our political consciousness, the way we relate to these historical
wounds has significance for the present. It is then crucial that Ethiopian
political theory reflect on the political meanings and implications of historical
wounds for the present and the future.
The centralization current keeps historical wounds open, because

centralization denies the autonomy of the historically formed pan-ethnic
regions such as Tigray, Gojam, Wello, Shoa, Gondar, Wellega, Arsi, Sidamo,
Bale, Hararge, Afar, KafFa, Ougaden, and so forth. The fragmentation current
also keeps historical wounds open, but in a different way. It ruminates on the
sufferings of the past as if they were contemporary events, with the result that
the present is shrouded in "bitter hatred towards each other," to borrow the
language of the TPLF. The centralization and fragmentation currents thus
keep the wounds of the past open through different mechanisms, and in doing
so, both nourish the distorted reading of Ethiopia as a colonial power. The
integration current, on the other hand, recognizes Ethiopia as a composite
rather than as a homogeneous nation, and expresses the autonomy of the
historically formed regions as different ways of manifesting the diversity of
the Ethiopian commonly shared space and composite identity. Historically,
however, the integration current flips over into either the centralization or the
fragmentation current, because Ethiopians have not yet fully and critically
embraced and overcome the consequences of the dark side of their history?
the violence, the conquest, the domination and the exploitation through which
history has created Ethiopians as a people and Ethiopia as a commonly shared
space.
It is instructive to note that the question of the meaning of the sufferings
of past generations for the present is one which philosophers and social
scientists?Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Renan, and many others?have paid
attention to.46 But Ethiopian culture provides us a concept we could use for
considering this issue from within Ethiopian history: the concept of merdo,
which I would like to harness for developing a historically informed political
concept: yetarikawi merdo or historical merdo. Merdo is tidings about a relative's
death. The addressees are informed about the death so that they could integrate
it into their lives, go beyond it, and meet the challenges of the present and the
future instead of wasting their lives ruminating on a painful past. By historical
merdo, I mean a critical historical awareness of the sufferings of the past that
permits a similar "work of mourning"47 so as to settle Ethiopia's account with
her past in order to meet successfully the present challenges of poverty and
oppression. To make this historical work of mourning possible, the sufferings
of the past should be seen as a historical merdo to all Ethiopians, and in a double
sense: first, as sufferings that are constitutive of the formation of the Ethiopian
state; and, second as sufferings that also embody the lost opportunities for
building a better society.
To start with, historical merdo is not possible if we do not go beyond

"painism."48 We need to make a distinction between the "being" of past
sufferings and their "meaning".49 The "being" of these events contains the
pain and hatred that accompany them, but the meanings of such events cannot
be comprehended if painism becomes the grid for interpreting them, because,
then, the surplus-history of Ethiopia will be reduced to sheer trauma and its
outcomes will be perceived through the distorting lenses of hatred and the
desire for revenge. Painism makes it appear as if the present discontent results
from the incapacity to change the past. But the reason for the current discontent
cannot be the incapacity to change the past; but rather the realization that the
present conditions are inimical for creating what Ethiopians believe to be a
just political order. What confronts Ethiopians today is not the past but the
actually existing problems of famine, AIDS, malaria, absolute poverty, and
oppression.
But going beyond painism is not enough. To be successful, historical merdo
needs to do a triple work. First, to achieve a liberating merdo, the events of the
past must be exposed, without which the hidden past will continue to haunt
the present. Second, the causes of these sufferings must be identified and
explained so that they will not repeat themselves. Third, the knowledge and
understanding of these events should allow Ethiopians to appropriate the past
as an instructive inheritance rather than live it as a haunting experience. Here,
historical merdo uses distancing as a modality of remembering, not in the sense
of denying the events but in the sense of detaching these events from present
concerns.50
In appropriating the distorted and repressed contents of the past, we

retroactively rework what we have become and "posit our own presuppositions,"
and recognize ourselves as historical subjects.51 We thus unchain our desire for
democracy from the cage of the repressed and repressive past, saving us from
the compulsive recreation of tyranny that has afflicted us repeatedly every time
we have tried to get rid of it. However, like the merdo, which presupposes a social
unit, the historical merdo presupposes that Ethiopians constitute a people, hizb.
But since the 1994 Constitution describes Ethiopians as "peoples," keeping
past wounds open, whether Ethiopians constitute or not a people is an issue
that Ethiopian political theory need to reflect upon in order to harness, in
the pursuit of democracy, the future-orientedness that historical merdo makes
possible.
Hizb or People, or Hizbotch or Peoples
The current dominant Ethiopian political thinking conceives Ethiopians

as victims to be saved from "feudalism" or to be liberated from "Abyssinian"
colonialism. In all cases, the ruling elites see themselves as liberators and treat
Ethiopians as a table rase on which they imprint their will?communism (The
Derg), or ethnic politics (The EPRDF). To this political paternalism, Ethiopian

political theory must respond with a democratic concept of people.
In the context of Ethiopian history, the concept of hizb or people is a

necessary premise for democracy. Being the result of surplus-history whose
workings dissolve ethnic boundaries and identities as limits to one's social and
political self-definitions, the concept of hizb carries within itself the idea of
a struggle to include in the people all those who are not as yet recognized
as full-fledged members.52 Such a struggle for inclusion is what drives the
disintegrative and integrative processes that formed Ethiopia. The demand to
be included takes different forms: from individuals who take up arms against
those in power (shiftas) to those who refuse to pay taxes, and from the rebellions
of local notables to those of peasants.53 Such struggles for inclusion, combined
with the subterranean work of surplus-history, contribute in the long run to
the undermining of the institutions from within which these struggles arise
and create something that goes beyond those involved in these struggles; that
is, the external relations between the antagonists are eventually transformed
into internal relations, creating a commonly shared space and constituting the
hizbotch (peoples) as hizb or a people.
To pluralize the concept of people as hizbotch and equate it with ethnies,

as the 1994 Constitution does, is to divest it of its inclusive dimension and,
subsequently, of its democratic telos. As Clapham observes, the 1994Constitution
adopts "a peculiarly anthropological approach to state-building".54 Unlike the
political concept of people, the ethnie is an ethnological concept that functions
as a category of exclusion. As a collective social subject, the ethnie provides
neither a historical agency nor a political logic of emancipation, which explains
why, for example, the Apartheid regime recognized ethnic groups as exclusive
units and gave the Bantustans the option to become independent.55 Ethnic self
determination does not entail political emancipation insofar as ethnicity, being
an exclusive category, does not possess the universalizing and emancipatory
dynamics of the political concept of people. Not surprisingly, the African
National Congress rejected the ethnie as a political category and declared South
Africans "a people".56 Highly decentralized Swiss and multi-ethnic India and
Russia describe themselves as "a people" in their respective constitutions.57
One reason for this is that "people," in the singular, is a necessary political
premise for founding a democratic order, because democracy needs to refer
to a criterion of universal inclusion, the people, which transcends empirical
differences, such as ethnicity, in order to have a commonly shared realm that
is articulated in terms of the universal norms of freedom, equality, solidarity
and social justice.
Yetarikawi Adera or Anamnestic Solidarity
Considering surplus-history as the condition of possibility of the process

that in creating Ethiopia's commonly shared space and identity and constituting
Ethiopians as a people also inflicted sufferings that necessitate a historical
merdo invites us to view history as "an unending dialogue between the past
and the present" and as a dialogue between the given and the tacit.58 In light of
the present situation which shows that Ethiopians, as a people, are still subject
to oppression and poverty, and still aspire for a better life like their ancestors,
such a dialogue raises three questions: First, are there links between the past
struggles that have taken place at different times and places? Second, are there
links between the aspirations and diverse struggles of the past and the present
struggles against oppression and poverty? And finally, if there are such links
between past struggles and the present ones, does the struggle for democracy
require for its success that the present generation recognize an obligation to
past generations to bring to fruition their failed hopes?
To answer these questions, I would like to introduce here the concept of

yetarikawi adera or historical adera. The Ethiopian sense of ayat (ancestors)
bridges the gap between the dead and the living by invoking the adera (which
means duty, request, and pleading, all three rolled into one) Ethiopians receive
from their ancestors to carry out unfulfilled tasks. Not to fulfill these tasks is
to betray (massattat) one's ancestors, thus implying that the living have some
kind of moral obligation to complete the unfulfilled tasks of the past. This is
comparable to the idea of "anamnestic solidarity"59?solidarity based on the
remembrance of the emancipatory struggles of the past?one finds in Western
progressive traditions, but it has an even more politically compelling resonance
in the Ethiopian context of the historical continuity of poverty and oppression.
I will argue that yetarikawi adera is internally connected to historical merdo and
a powerful tool in the construction of democracy.
Ethiopian history is characterized by conflicts, regional rebellions and
peasant revolts. It is certainly the case that in pre-1960 Ethiopia many of these
revolts have been primarily rural. "None of the revolts," writes Tareke, "was
capable of upsetting the whole system of social organization, nor was that its
goal."60 This is true of all past peasant struggles. But to interpret such rebellions
as acts that "seek to protect a vanishing world"61 and to exclude the hope for
a better society from the peasants' goals, fails to grasp the polysemy of the
peasants' acts. It thus misconstrues the immediate meanings of these acts as the
limits of the possible intentions that the acts are pregnant of and reduces their
revolts to disconnected aleatory events. That Ethiopian peasants express their
hopes in idioms of a golden past age incompatible with the modern vocabularies
of emancipation may be true. But to infer from the "non-synchronism"62 of
their appeal to a past golden age for solutions to contemporary problems, that
they want to maintain a "vanishing world," occludes their revolts' surplus
meanings, which is a hope of a better life in the future.63 It truncates their
acts from their latent emancipatory meanings by assuming that the peasants'
acts are transparent brute data, without surplus meanings and effects. Such an
empiricist assumption prevents us from enucleating from the peasants' revolts
the internal emancipatory logic that connects their seemingly disparate acts.
In addition, the dissociation of resistance to internal oppression from

resistance to external oppression-Mekdella (1868), Gundat (1875), Gura
(1876), Dogali (1887), Mettema (1889), Adwa (1896), Mai Chew (1936),
and the Patriotic Resistance to Fascism (1936- 1941)- creates a historical
consciousness gap. Once more, considering these as discrete events prevents
us from enucleating the emancipatory links between resistance to external
and internal oppression, thus reducing Ethiopian history to disconnected and
fortuitous events. What escapes our understanding in the empiricist reading
of Ethiopian history is that the past generations' resistance to internal and
external oppressions bear within their surplus-history the seeds of resistance
to all oppression, tout court. It is only by recovering the Ariadne thread of
emancipation that winds its way through the labyrinth of the surplus-history
of the various acts of resistance to internal and external oppressions that we
can bring intelligibility and universality to the conflicts that characterize the
history of Ethiopia. In this sense, we could answer two of the three questions
raised at the beginning of this section: There are links of emancipatory
intention between the past struggles that have taken place at different times and
places; and, second, that the diverse struggles of the past and of the present
against oppression and poverty are interconnected through the historically
shared and still unfulfilled aspirations for a better life. However to answer the
third question?does the struggle for democracy require for its success that
the present generation recognize an obligation to past generations to bring to
fruition their failed hopes??we have to develop the argument further.
We saw earlier the importance of historical merdo and the need for Ethiopians
to embrace their history fully and critically. This means acknowledging
Ethiopia's history as a document of both freedom (the liberation from primary
identifications and the deepening and widening of Ethiopian history that
comes with it) and "barbarism,"64 i.e., as a document of violence, exploitation
and oppression. To recognize this dark side of Ethiopia's history is to make
a transition from a spontaneous to a critical historical consciousness that
throws light on the past as a period of shared hopes and struggles for a better
life, hopes and struggles that Ethiopians inherit as uncompleted tasks. This
connects the struggles of the past against the old forms of oppression to those
of the present against the inherited and the new forms of oppression. The
present struggles for a better society thus gain a deeper meaning, for, in seeing
the present struggles as necessitated by the failures of past struggles, Ethiopians
become aware of the particular historical preconditions of the past and present
struggles, allowing them to go to the roots of their problems and forestalling
the re-emergence of oppression in new forms. Ethiopians thus fulfill the tasks
inherited from their ancestors and go beyond them in that they uproot both the
existent old conditions and the new ones that generate oppression and poverty.
The answer to the third question, which indeed contains the other two, is that
Ethiopians have a yetarikawi adera, an obligation of anamnestic solidarity.
We can now see why yetarikawi adera is an essential component of
historical merdo and a powerful ally for deepening the roots of the current
demands for democracy and social justice. Ethiopian political theory will have
a thin understanding of Ethiopian politics if it does not examine the place
of yetarikawi adera and yetarikawi merdo in the creation and consolidation of
democracy. However, the conjunction of yetarikawi merdo and yetarikawi adera
must be understood in terms of a "dialectical recognition" and not in terms of
a "recollection" of past injustices.65 A dialectical recognition of past injustices
is a historicized memory that acknowledges the new contradictions that
articulate the present conditions and aims to transform them through a forward
looking emancipatory project. It helps us avoid painism and the compulsive
recreation of tyranny and injustice, with which we are afflicted since the
1960s. A recollection of past injustices is a non-historicized remembrance that
is blind to the novelty of the present and to the historical specificity of its
contradictions and dwells on the sufferings of the past, opening the door to
painism, ethnic hatred, and tyranny.
The current political impasse in Ethiopia reflects these two radically

opposed appropriations of the past. The EPRDF ignores the historical present
and its new characteristics and reads Ethiopian history and politics as a
recollection of past injustices that could be rectified only through the creation
of ethnicstans and the articulation and distribution of power through electoral
substitutionalism. The democratic opposition starts with the historical present
as the ground for a dialectical recognition of past injustices and argues that a
forward-looking emancipatory politics is possible only if the already historically
formed Ethiopian quest for universality is taken into account, which means a
political system based on non-exclusive criteria and democratic representation
rather than on substitutionalism.
Democracy and Ethiopian Political Theory
The consideration of surplus-history shows not only the radical

inadequacy of tabula rasa theorizing but also the impossibility of democracy
based on borrowed meanings. One could borrow a democratic theory but not
a democratic culture, and a thriving democracy needs a democratic culture.
Ethiopian political theory could contribute to the development of a democratic
culture only if it succeeds in indigenizing democratic theory. The best example
to illustrate the need for indigenizing democratic theory is that of Christianity
and Islam in Ethiopia. Though Ethiopian Christianity (Tewahdo) has the same
origins and refers to the same Bible as European Christianity, Tewahdo is infused
with the culture that evolved through Ethiopia's surplus-history; and yet, it is
as Christian as any other Christianity when it comes to the fundamental beliefs
and criteria of Christian life. That is, in Ethiopia, Christianity has an Ethiopian
expression without losing its universal characteristics. The same is true of
Ethiopian Islam which has an Ethiopian expression without losing its universal
characteristics. In Wollo, for example, it reflects the values of the composite
identity that emerged from surplus-history such that there is a high degree
of tolerance and inter-mixing between Muslims and Christians. Similarly,
Ethiopia will have a democratic culture only if democracy has an Ethiopian
expression without losing its universal characteristics. Without a democratic
culture, the consolidation of democracy in the face of the multiple internal
and external adversities Ethiopia faces, and will continue to face, cannot be
ensured. It is therefore essential that democratic theory be indigenized.
I will discuss this issue in two parts-5?ra ena werk democracy and the
autochthonous sources of democratic concepts
Semena Werk Democracy
There is a consensus among Ethiopians that democracy is the solution

to the two inseparable problems they confront: poverty and oppression.
However, recognizing that there is a consensus on democracy as the answer
to Ethiopia's political and economic problems is easier than agreeing on what
this democracy should mean in the Ethiopian context. Even within the West
where its modern form originated, democracy is, to borrow Gallie's term, an
"essentially contested concept."66 In the Ethiopian context, where political
practices are the products of a different historical dynamics and where daily
life is, for the majority of Ethiopians, a deadly obstacle course that Westerners
cannot even imagine, democracy is an even more contested concept.
Currently, democracy exists for Ethiopians in two different ways: first, as

ideas, practices and institutions that emerged in the West; or as an answer
to the Ethiopian quest for ideas, ideals and institutions that could overcome
tyranny and poverty. Democracy in the first sense is not necessarily the same
as in the second sense. In the first sense, democracy involves borrowing
from the West ideas, practices and institutions to solve problems that are
precipitated by Ethiopia's history. In the second sense, democracy means

Ethiopians recognizing themselves as historical agents engaged in overcoming
their political and economic problems with freedom and social justice as the
axioms of their actions. Given the historical differences between the West and
Ethiopia, it is highly problematic to assume that the second way to democracy
will be a mere repetition of the Western experience of democracy.
Yet, the current practice is to consider the West as the active example of
democracy. Western election observers illustrate this exemplarity of Western
democracy to us. The observers' background beliefs that democratic procedures
express democratic content, probably true in their own historical context,
are the sources of their criteria of judgment as to the democraticness of the
electoral process they come to observe. We are thus insidiously caught in the
paradox of sem ena werk (wax and gold) relations. Sem ena werk is an Ethiopian
rhetorical trope where the intended meaning (the gold) is communicated
indirectly through statements that carry surface meanings (the form in the sem
or wax) that cloak the intended one (the werk or the gold). However, there is
no guarantee that the intended meaning is apprehended by the addressee. The
addressee may latch on to the form in the sem and miss the "gold."
The question of democracy provides an illustration of this sem ena werk

relation between Western democracy and Ethiopian politics. Currently,
"democracy" in Ethiopia is a practice which treats Ethiopians as the sem on
which the "gold" of Western democracy imprints its form. And there is a name
for this form left on the sem: It is electoral democracy, defined as an "institutional
arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire
power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote."67
This formalist conception of democracy imprinted in the sem leaves an empty
space, the form in the sem, which could be filled with anything. Some of these
fillings are hardly democratic. Indeed, the regimes that emerge from the form
in the sem are now described as "electoral authoritarianism."68 Thus we have
now in Ethiopia a regime which expresses the sem form of Western democracy
but which practices substitutionalism instead of democratic representation,
imposes state ownership of land, legalizes the primacy of group rights over
individual rights, commits systematic human rights violations, imprisons the
democratically elected representatives of the people, journalists and trade
unionists, assassinates opponents and kills peaceful demonstrators, and so
forth.69
This does not mean that Ethiopians should borrow the West's political
systems in toto. Rather, when Ethiopians use the West as the example of
democracy, it is the example and not Ethiopians that are active, such that
democracy becomes indiscernible from the West itself. Ethiopians are thus
caught in a dilemma. They either reduce themselves to be the sem of Western
democracy, or they try to borrow the content also of Western democracy. But
the former legitimates authoritarianism wrapped in "democratic" elections, the
EPRDF regime illustrates this outcome; the latter legitimates a Kemalist type
of dictatorship in the name of modernization. Ethiopians have experienced the
latter in the form of "socialist" modernization under the Derg. Both options
operate as engines of authoritarianism. This is a challenge Ethiopian political
theory has avoided to come to grips with by resorting to tabula rasa theorizing
that transforms Ethiopians into sem instead of enucleating the potential
democratic "gold" that is present in the interstices of Ethiopia's surplus
history and using it as a source for a critical mediation and appropriation of
the democratic theories and practices Ethiopians may have to borrow.
The Autochthonous Sources of Democratic Concepts
Surplus-history, as the condition of possibility of Ethiopian political life,

has had also a profound effect on the emergence and development of Ethiopian
political language. It has secreted concepts that are pregnant with democratic
meanings. The concepts of mebet (individual right), netsanet (liberty), gil
(private as opposed to public), tikim, (interest) 70 carry within themselves
the imprints of a historical evolution of meanings that point towards ideas
and values universally identified as democratic. The distinction between
tekawami (opponent) and telat (enemy) opens the door for the notion of loyal
opposition, essential in a democracy. The distinctions between melektegna
(roughly messenger and delegate rolled into one), telaki (messenger), and wekil
(agent) offer a rich semantic field for theorizing democratic representation
from within the intersubjective meanings that are constitutive of Ethiopian
social practices. The Ethiopian ideal puts heg (law) above the person, expressed
in the Ethiopian enthusiasm for muget (litigation) and fiteh (justice); solidarity
is deeply engrained in institutions of cooperation such as mahber, edirf eqib ,
senbete, debo\ the concept of sew contains within itself the idea of respect for a
human being, as in the expression sew new eko (to mean roughly: he is a human
being, he merits respect); and the expression yene bite sew (a human being like
me)?used to refer to a beggar to evoke his humanity?indicates the notion of
fundamental equality between all humans. To be sure, all these concepts have
to be unpacked carefully to enucleate their universal democratic content from
within the webs of relations and meanings inscribed in our social practices and
their surplus meanings and effects. But this is precisely the task of Ethiopian
political theory.71
If Ethiopians are to move from democracy as a procedure (the electoral form

in the sem) to democracy as a culture, Ethiopian political theory has to abandon
tabula rasa theorizing and enucleate from Ethiopia's surplus-history meanings
and practices capable of critically mediating, articulating and indigenizing

democratic ideas, ideals, beliefs, hopes, and tasks. The issue here is not which
comes first: democracy as a procedure or democracy as culture? Democracy as
procedure is possible at any level of economic development;72 but Ethiopia's
experience under the EPRDF suggests that democracy as a procedure cannot
go further than electoral authoritarianism and substitutionalism, if it is not
accompanied with the indigenization of democratic theory and the birth of a
democratic culture.
Conclusion: Political Theory and Democratic Culture
In making the above arguments, I am not saying that Ethiopians should not
borrow ideas and practices from the West. Every society borrows something
from others. However, the West borrowed the numerals and algebra from
the Arabs, but it did not mimic Islamic civilization; it took Christianity from
the Middle East, but it did not mimic Middle Eastern civilizations. Rather,
it mediated what it borrowed through its own historically generated social
practices and meanings and used the intellectual and material productions of
others as raw material for its own development in accord with its own purposes.
The West was thus able to maintain itself as a self-directing entity. The problem
in Ethiopia is not borrowing per se, but the unmediated and uncritical borrowing
of the West's intellectual productions as pr?t ? porter knowledge. Borrowing
political theories unmediated by Ethiopian history and social practices has
led to tabula rasa theorizing on Ethiopian politics, leading the country into the
destructive experiments of the Derg (communism) and of the EPRDF (ethnic
politics).
One may borrow a democratic theory, but one cannot borrow a democratic
culture. A democratic culture cannot be created in the context of tabula
rasa theorizing; rather, it grows from within one's own social practices and
constitutive meanings, articulating with and differentiating itself from the
existing practices and meanings; challenging, contradicting, innovating, and
transforming them from within. Ethiopian political theory has a crucial role
in instigating and nurturing this inception and growth of democratic language
and culture from within Ethiopian social practices. If Ethiopian political theory
does not assume this task, it will be irrelevant to Ethiopian politics.
One may ask: What has political theory got to do with democratic culture?
What is characteristic of modernity?and that's what we are trying to create
in Ethiopia and democracy is one of its essential elements?is that theory has
a historical primacy in social transformations.73 "It often happens," writes
Charles Taylor, "that what starts off as theories held by a few people come
to infiltrate the social imaginary, first of elites...and then...the whole society.

This is what has happened.. .to the theories of Grotius and Locke... ."74
When political theory is rooted in Ethiopia's history and inter-subjective

meanings, the ideas, ideals, vocabularies, and norms it articulates percolate
into Ethiopia's culture and give rise to, and render meaningful, new political
practices. And the new practices, with the new "implicit understandings
[they] generate, can be the basis for modifications of theory, which in turn
can inflect practice, and so on."75 In other words, one of the conditions for
making the transition from democracy as procedure to democracy as culture
is a political theory that attends to the polyphony of Ethiopia's surplus-history
and establishes a fruitful and mutually transformative dialogue with and
within Ethiopian social practices, thus laying the ground for the emergence of
a culture that recognizes freedom and social justice as the axioms of political
life. As Appiah notes, "to give people a conceptual vocabulary is to inform
them; but to deprive them of it is to cripple them, not to improve them."76 An
Ethiopian political theory that does not recognize this and remains rooted in
tabula rasa theorizing cannot contribute to the development of democracy in
Ethiopia.
Notes
1 John Young, Peasant Revolution in Ethiopia: The Tigray Peoples Liberation Front, 1975
1993, (Cambridge University Press, New York 1997). Aaron Tesfaye, Political Power and
Ethnic Federalism, (Lanham, University press of America 2002). Marc Fontrier, La Chute
de la Junte Militaire Ethiopienne, (L^Harmattan, Paris 1999). The Constitution of the Federal
Republic of Ethiopia, (Addis Abeba, 1994).
2 The novel by Sisay Negusu, Rekik Ashera, (in Amharic) (Artistic Printing Press,
Addis Abeba, 1995) catches the intensity of the current mood of societal blockage. For an
overview of modern Ethiopian literature, see Reidulf K. Molvaer, Black Lions: The Creative
Lives of Modern Ethiopia's Literary Giants and Pioneers, (The Red Sea Press, Lawrenceville,
1996).
3 Alessandro Triulzi, "Battling with the Past: New Frameworks for Ethiopian
Historiography" in Wendy James, Donald L. Donham, Elsei Kurimoto, eds., Remapping
Ethiopia: Communism and After, (James Curry, Oxford, 2002), pp. 285, 280.
4 UNDP, Human Development Indicators, 2004. www.undp.org.in/hdr 2004 On the

2004 Human Development Index, Ethiopia is 170th, seventh from last.
5 On the constitutive role of inter-subjective meanings in social practices, see Charles

Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988),
pp. 15-57.
ETHIOPIAN POLITICAL THEORY, DEMOCRACY AND SURPLUS HISTORY_27
6 Afrocentrism throws out the baby (knowledge) and keeps the bathwater (rhetoric).
All knowledge has a universal dimension. The challenge is to indigenise its universality, and
this requires a strenuous intellectual labour that those who describe Western knowledge as
ethnocentric are unwilling to engage in.
7 Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Harvard University Press, Cambridge,

1995), pp. 146-164 on some of the questions that arise when studying other societies and
cultures. B. Malinowski, Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (Harcourt, Brace and World,
New Yorkl967), p. 119. He writes, "What is the deepest essence in my investigations?
To discover what are his [the native's] main passions, the motives for his conduct, his
aims...His essential, deepest way of thinking. At this point we are confronted with our
own problems: what is essential to ourselves?"
8 Donald D. Levine, Wax and Gold (Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1972), pp.
242,247,248,250,252.
9 The study of other societies continues to serve as a foil for the West's self-understanding.
An example of such a study in political theory is: Adrian Leftwich, Redefining Politics
(Methew & Co, London 1983).
10 The concept of anamorphosis suggests new avenues for understanding the "gaze"
involved in the comparative act in studies of societies such as Ethiopia. Slavoj Zizek The
Sublime Object of Ideology, (Verso, London, 1989), pp.98-129.
11 Indeed, the author partly admits this much when he writes, "If I sought to throw
light on the dilemmas facing Ethiopians, it has been in part with the end of providing a
mirror against which the dilemmas of Western societies might also be viewed." Levine,
Wax and Gold. p. xi.
12 Comparativists may not be able to avoid using the other as a foil to understand
their own societies. Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror (Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, 1987).
1 Contemporary Ethiopian literature expresses well this feeling of alienation. See for
example the social historical novel by Mamo Wedineh, YeTenteku Tawintoch, (in Amharic)
(Tmemad, Addis Abeba, 1995).
14 For an overview of Ethiopian history, see Harold Marcus, H. Marcus, A History of

Ethiopia, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994. Richard Pankhurst, The Ethiopians,
Oxford, Blackwell, 1998.
15 The National Electoral Board of Ethiopia, Official election resultsfor the House of Peoples'
Representatives, August 9, 2005, ],lta7;Z/,mYW.filfiainn.lgtll 1017la, 17.??.S Pan-ethnic parties, the
Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) and the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces
(UEDF) won 109 and 52 seats respectively.
16 Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (University of Minnesota Press,

Minneapolis, 1988).
17 For some of the diverse elements of these interactions, see, Richard Pankhurst,
A Social History of Ethiopia, (The Red Sea Press, Trenton, NJ, 1992). Provinces such as
Gonder, Gojam, Tigrai, Shoa, Arsi, Wellega, Hararge, Sidamo, Gomu Goffa, Ilubabor,
28_INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ETHIOPIAN STUDIES
Bale, Wello, could be seen as historically formed pan-ethnic regions due to the works of
surplus-history.
18 Messay Kebede. Survival and Modernization, Ethiopia 's Enigmatic Present: A Philosophic
Discourse (The Red Sea Press, Lawrenceville 1999). See his study of the relationship between
idil and the Ethiopian concept of the individual, pp.207-225.
19 Meies Zenawi, Ye Ertra Hizb TigelKeyet Wedet (in Amharic) (Washngton DC, 1979).
Addis Hiwet, Ethiopia: From Autocracy to Revolution (ROAPE, Occasional Publications No. 1,
London, 1975), p. 3; Asefa Jalata, Oromia and Ethiopia: State Formation and Ethnonational
Conflict, 18684992 (Lynn Reiner Publishers. Boulder, 1993). Holcomb B. and S. Ibsa, The
Invention of Ethiopia, (The Red Sea Press, Lawrenceville, 1990). Lenco Latta, The Ethiopia
State at the Crossroads: Decolonization & Democratization or Disintegration (The Red Sea Press,
Lawrenceville, 1999). "The National Question in Ethiopia" Combat, V, II, (1976).
20 The driving force of the EPRDF is the TPLF which draws many of its members,
including Prime Minister Meies Zenawi, from MALELIT, the Marxist-Leninist League of
Tigray. The TPLF used the "colonial thesis" as its premise for organising the Ethiopian
state as a collection of "liberated" ethnicstans. Young, Peasant Revolution in Ethiopia,
pp.134-140.
21 Hiwet, Ethiopia: from autocracy to revolution, pp.3-4. For other examples of such
"epicycles" see Holcomb and Ibsa, The Invention of Ethiopia, pp. 11-26.
22 Sven Rubenson, The Survival of Ethiopian Independence (Heinemann, London, 1978).

pp.xv-xx. The six maps covering the period from 1314 to 1941 give an idea of this territorial
flux.
23 Christopher Clapham, Transformation and Continuity in Revolutionary Ethiopia

(Cambridge University Press, New York, 1988), pp. 195, 197.
24 Tareke Gebru, Ethiopia: Power and Protest ( Cambridge University Press, New York
1991), p.37.
25 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (Cambridge University Press,

Cambridge, 1975), p. 176.
26Harold G. Marcus, The Life and Times of Menelik I: Ethiopia 1844-1913, (Clarendon
Press, Oxford 1975). Alberto Sbacchi, Ethiopia Under Mussolini: Fascism and the Colonial
Experience (Zed Books. London, 1985. W.E.D.Allen, Guerrilla War In Abyssinia (Penguin,
Harmondsworth 1943).
27 Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonis? pr?c?d? du portrait du colonisateur. R??dition,

(Gallimard, Paris, 1985). Georges Balandier, Anthropologie Politique (PUF, Paris, 1978).
28 Assafa Jaleta, Oromia and Ethiopia: State Formation and Ethnonational Conflict, 1868
1992 (Lynn Reinner Publishers, Boulder, 1993), p. 161.
29 Christpher Clapham, Haile Selassies Government, (Praeger, New York, 1969), p.81.
30 Paul B. Henze, Layers of Time a History of Ethiopia (Hurst and Company, London
2000), p. 120. The Amhara-Oromo synthesis is an outcome of surplus-history, something,
for example, the Italians were unable to see both in 1896 and 1935. R.Greenfield, Ethiopia:
A New Political History, (Pall Mall, London 1965), p.230, "The Italians appear not to have
understood that leading families were as often Galla as Amhara, or were a mixture of both,
and constitute a class, not an ethnic group." J.Markakis, Ethiopia: Anatomy of a Traditional
Polity, (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1974), p.48. He notes that "the Tigre are apt to refer to
the Amhara ... as half-Galla (sic)." Ethiopians consider this claim a truism, for the Oromos
and Amharas share numerous cultural markers in their daily lives.
31 For the names of some of the prominent leaders, see Tobia,, 4, 6 (Megabit 1988
(E.C.)) and Tobia, 4, 8, (Sene 1988 (E.C.)). On the Zemene Mesafint, see Mordechai Abir,
Ethiopia: The Era of the Princes, (Longmans, London, 1968).
32 Maimire Mennasemay, "Adwa: A Dialogue Between the Past and the Present"
Northeast African Studies, 4,2, (1997), pp. 43-89, discusses this issue.
33 A curious outcome is the EPRDF practice of officially identifying the ethnic identity
of ministers. See www.WflJtflinf^
34 Prime Minister Meies Zenawi quoted in Horn of Africa Bulletin, vol.6, 1, (Jan-Feb
1994). Sara Vaughan, "Ethnicity and the Prospects for Democratization in Ethiopia",
in Louise de la Gorgondi?re, Kenneth King, Sara Vaughan, eds., Ethnicity in Africa Roots,
Meanings and Implications (Center of African Studies, University of Edinburgh 1996), pp.
333-350.
35 The Transition Charter (1991), Proclamation 7/1992, and The Constitution of the Federal
Republic of Ethiopia, article 39 gives each ethnie the right to self-determination including
secession.
36 In this regard, the 1994 Ethiopian Constitution reflects many of the proto-fascists
ideas valorising ethnicity that have emerged in Europe in the 1980s and 90s, especially in
the works of the leading theoretician of the New Right, Alain de Benoist, who stresses the
incommensurability of ethnic cultures and advocates the creation of homogeneous ethnic
political entities as an alternative to liberalism. Alain de Benoist, Europe, Tiers monde m?me
combat, (Laffont, Paris, 1996).
37 All the member parties of the EPRDF are ethnic parties where membership is
ascriptively determined.
38 Coalition for Unity and Democracy, Election Manifesto (in Amharic) (Addis Abeba,
1997).
39 On the irregularity that surrounded the elections, European Union Election

Observation Mission Ethiopia 2005, Preliminary Statement on the Election Appeals' Process,
The Re-run of Elections and the Somali Region Elections, (Addis Ababa, 25 August 2005).
40 Maimire Mennasemay, "Federalism, Ethnicity, and the Transition to Democracy,"

in Horn of Africa, Vol XXI (2003), pp. 88-115.
41 For the peasant revolts in Tigray, Gojam, and Bale, see Tareke, Ethiopia: Power and
Protest.
42 Quoted in John Young, Peasant Revolution in Ethiopia,. p. 100.
Associated Press, 9 May 2005.
44 The National Electoral Board of Ethiopia, Official election results... The final official
tally gives the major democratic opposition, the CUD, 109 seats. However, there is credible
evidence to suggest that the opposition might in fact have won the elections. European
Union Election Observation Mission Ethiopia 2005, Preliminary Statement.
45 Quoted in Solomon Gashaw, Solomon Gashaw, "Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict

in Ethiopia" in Crawford Young, ed. The Rising Tide of Cultural Pluralism (University of
Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1993), p. 143.
46 Nietzsche writes: "There is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical

sense which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing, whether this living thing be a
man or a people or a culture. To determine the degree, and therefore the boundary at which
the past has to be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present, one would
have to know exactly how great the plastic power of a man, a people, a culture is: I mean
by plastic power the capacity ... to heal wounds, to replace what has been lost, to recreate
broken moulds." E Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge
University Press, New York, 1983), p.62. See also Ernst Renan who in his celebrated 1882
essay argued that forgetting is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation. Ernst Renan,
Qu'est qu'une nation? (Imprimerie Nationale Paris, 1996). Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte, (International Publisher, New York, 1969), pp. 15-26. C?lestin Monga,
The Anthropology of Anger: Civil Society and Democracy in Africa (Lynne Rienner Publishers,
Boulder 1996), p. 179.
47 Catherine Malabou, "History and the Process of Mourning in Hegel and Freud," in
Radical Philosophy, 106 (2001) p.19.
48 Richard Ryder, Painism: A Modern Morality ( Opengate Press, London 2001). I use this
term rather differently to emphasize how the focus on pain obliterates political questions.
49 George R. Lucas, Jr. "Recollection, Forgetting, and the Hermeneutics of History:

Meditations on a theme from Hegel" in Shaun Gallaher, Hegel, History, and Interpretation
(State University of New York Press, New York, 1997), pp.105-109.
50 Marc Aug?, Oblivion (University of Minneapolis Press, Minneapolis 2004). He

develops an original and persuasive argument on the importance of distancing and
forgetting to value what we remember. Lucas, "Recollection,.." pp.105-109. See also
George R. Lucas, Jr. "Recollection, Forgetting, and the Hermeneutics of History...."
51 For the dialectical movement expressed in "positing ones presuppositions," see

Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do (Verso, London, 2002), pp. 130-131.
52 Arendt shows how in certain historical contexts, the conceptualization of people is

profoundly democratic. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution ("Viking Press, New York, 1963),
p. 70.
53 Donald Crummey, "Banditry and resistance: noble and peasant in nineteenth

century" in Donald Crummey, ed. , Banditry, Rebellion and Social Protest in Africa (James
Curry, London 1986), pp 133-151; Timothy Fernyhough, " Social mobility and dissident
elites in northern Ethiopia: the role of banditry, 1900-1965," in Crummey, Banditry... pp.
151-173.
54 Cristpher Clapham, "Controlling Space in Ethiopia", in Wendy James, Donald L

Donham, Eisei Kurimonto, Allesandro Triulzi, Remapping Ethiopia, p.27.
55 P. Harries, "Exclusion, Classification and Internal Colonialism: The Emergence

of Ethnicity Among the Tsonga-speakers of South Africa," in Leroy Vail, The Creation
of Tribalism in Southern Africa, (James Currey, London, 1989), p. 104. Dunbar T Moodie,
The Rise of Afrikanerdom: Power, Apartheid, and the Afrikaner Civil Religion (University of
California Press, Berkeley, 1975).
56 The South African Constitution opens with these words: "We, the people of South
Africa... " http://confinder.richmond.edu
57 Russian Constitution: "We, the multinational people of the Russian Federation...";

The Indian Constitution: "We, the people of India..."; "In the name of God Almighty!
We, the Swiss People and the Cantons..."; Nigeria's and other multiethnic nations"
constitutions refer to themselves as a people. For the respective constitutions, see, http://
confinder.richmond.edu.
58 E. H. Carr, What Is History? (Vintage Books, New York, 1961), p.35.
59 Christian Lenhardt, "Anamnestic Solidarity: The Proletariat and its Manes," Telos,
25 (1975), pp. 133-54.
60 Tareke Gebru, Ethiopia, p. 199.
61 Tareke Gebru, Ethiopia, p. 3.
62 E.Bloch, "Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to its Dialectics," New German

Critique, 11 (1977), pp.22-28.
63 Ernst Bloch, "Dialectics and Hope," New German Critique, 9 (1976), pp.3-10.
64 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations , (Schocken Books, New York 1976), p.256.
65 For the distinction between and the political implications of dialectical recognition
(anagnorisis) and recollection (anamnesis), see Bloch's discussion of these terms in Michael
Landmann, "Talking with Ernst Bloch: Korcula, 1968," Telos, 25, (1975), pp. 178, 179.
66 W. B. Gallie, "Essentially Contested Concepts," in Max Black, ed. The Importance of

Language (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs 1962), pp 121-146.
67 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Communism and Democracy (Allen and Unwin,

London, 1976), p.260.
68 Larry Diamond, "Elections Without Democracy: Thinking About Hybrid Regimes"

Journal of Democracy 13, 2 (April 2002), pp. 21-35.
69 Ethiopian Human Rights Council, Special Report, 83 (07, June, 2005).

Amnesty International, Urgent Action Appeal, AFR 25.001/2005 (2005). Siegfried
Pausewang, Kjetil Tronvoll, Lovise Aalen, Ethiopia Since theDerg: A Decade of Democratic
Pretension andPerformance (Zed Books, London, 2002), pp.230-244.
70 Tekim, pace Donald Levine, is not a concept limited to "narrowly conceived self
interest," for the term for narrowly conceived self-interest is ye gil tekim. Levine, Wax and
Gold, p.242.
71 A step in this direction is: Messay Kebede. Survival and Modernization, Ethiopia's
Enigmatic Present: A Philosophic Discourse (The Red Sea Press, Lawrenceville, 1999).
72 Adam Przeworski et al., Sustainable Democracy (Cambridge University Press,

Cambridge, 1995).
73 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Duke University Press, Durham, 2004),
p.29.
74 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, p.24.
75 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, p.30.

76 Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, (Princeton University Press, Princeton
2005), p. 47.

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Ethiopian Political Theory, Democracy, and Surplus History

Author(s): Maimire Mennasemay

The issue of tabula rasa theorizing in Ethiopian studies is considered through an

Some Issues in Ethiopian Political Theory

Tabula Rasa Theorizing and Pr?t ? Porter Knowledge

relativism that considers Western knowledge as inherently ethnocentric must

Moreover, given the high volume of knowledge Westerners have produced

Consider Donald Levine's study of Ethiopian culture. He claims that the

enough to develop a comparative knowledge of themselves. In this

At the confluence of African and Middle Eastern civilizations, m

Surplus-history is the imperceptible realm where the possible consequences

Surplus-history, fed continuously with the multifarious non-actua

In Ethiopia, the collapse of the coincidence between ethnic category a

What this means is that the work of surplus-history creates, slowly bu

Ethiopia: A Colonial State or A Composite Nation?

One of the conclusions of tabula rasa theorizing on Ethiopian politics is

The problem in depicting Ethiopia as a colonial state is that the Marxist

The 19th century consolidation of the Ethiopian state is not a miracle. It

external aggressions; consequently, the reach of the physical force of

Before the introduction of ethnic politics in 1991, Ethiopian

Not recognizing surplus-history leads to the two interrelated pro

Surplus-history and the Transition from Ethnic Diversity to Political diversity

Colonialism's distinguishing feature is the social, political, and economic

Substitutionalism vs Democratic Representation

In exposing the miscognition involved in considering Ethiopia either as

Unlike ethnicity, politics creates a framework of unity that cuts across

Substitutionalism is founded on ethnic corporatism. It assumes that the

In embracing substitutionalism in lieu of democratic representation as a

new form, i.e., as a federalism organized on the basis of ethnic corporatism

Surplus-history and Political Trajectories in Ethiopian History

Within the political history of Ethiopia, one finds diverse political

The centralization current is incarnated in the effort to concentrate political

as an absolute monarch. The Derg (1974-1991) intensified this centralization.

However, in resorting to an exclusive criterion of political organization as a

The integration current characterizes the Middle period or from Amde

Yetarikawi Merdo or the Historical Merdo

Ethiopian history, like the history of all state-building, is partly a history of

The centralization current keeps historical wounds open, because

To start with, historical merdo is not possible if we do not go beyond

In appropriating the distorted and repressed contents of the past, we

Hizb or People, or Hizbotch or Peoples

The current dominant Ethiopian political thinking conceives Ethiopians

Derg), or ethnic politics (The EPRDF). To this political paternalism, Ethiopian

In the context of Ethiopian history, the concept of hizb or people is a

To pluralize the concept of people as hizbotch and equate it with ethnies,

Yetarikawi Adera or Anamnestic Solidarity

Considering surplus-history as the condition of possibility of the process

To answer these questions, I would like to introduce here the concept of

In addition, the dissociation of resistance to internal oppression from

The current political impasse in Ethiopia reflects these two radically

Democracy and Ethiopian Political Theory

The consideration of surplus-history shows not only the radical

Semena Werk Democracy

There is a consensus among Ethiopians that democracy is the solution

Currently, democracy exists for Ethiopians in two different ways: first, as

precipitated by Ethiopia's history. In the second sense, democracy means

The question of democracy provides an illustration of this sem ena werk

The Autochthonous Sources of Democratic Concepts

Surplus-history, as the condition of possibility of Ethiopian political life,

If Ethiopians are to move from democracy as a procedure (the electoral form

and practices capable of critically mediating, articulating and indigenizing

Conclusion: Political Theory and Democratic Culture

to infiltrate the social imaginary, first of elites...and then...the whole society.