Abstract
On March 6, 2004, Waka town of Mareka woreda in Dawro zone of southern
Ethiopia hosted a boisterous cultural event – Day of Social Equality. This was an
aspirational event intended to draw attention to the stubborn reality of social
inequality. The event was jointly organized by Action Aid Ethiopia (AAE) (a
British NGO working on a broad range of development issues) and the Mareka
woreda (district) administration of the Ethiopian state. By any measure, this was
a well-organized event attended by a range of stakeholders including highranking government officials, dignitaries from the AAE national headquarters,
notable zonal and woreda state employees, traditional authority figures, and
importantly, by representatives of the most marginalized occupational minorities
in the Dawro society, namely, the mana and Manja cultural groups (see
pp. 68-69 for description). The head administrator of the Mareka woreda, Mr.
Alemu Meshesha, started his opening remarks by quoting Martin Luther King,
Jr. and Nelson Mandela as exemplars of the struggle for inclusion and equal
rights. Mr. Alemu also noted that preceding Ethiopian state regimes had used a
system of inequality as an instrument of maintaining their power. After all was
said and done, what came out as the villain responsible for the prevalence of
inequality in Dawro was the Dawro culture itself.
In 2000, I interviewed regional and zonal state officials and social sector
experts who all acknowledged that social discrimination was a prevalent challenge throughout southern Ethiopia. But its severity varied within this vast
region. Although there was no systematic, consistent, and sustained government
policy on the issue, a review of relevant provisions in the federal and SNNPR
state constitutions, as well as policy documents such as the Federal Cultural
Policy and Social Sector Policy Purview, suggest that the EPRDF government
recognized inequality, discrimination, and social exclusion as important challenges that need to be addressed (Teshome 2008; MOCI 1997; FDRE constitution especially articles 34, 39, 41; SNNPR constitution especially articles 25, 34,
35). The noted documents speak about “the principle of equality and justice,”
“warding off cultural practices that negatively affect dignity and democratic
rights of citizens,” and the need to “abolish cultural practices that violate human
rights.” Stressing that there were ample legal provisions on these issues, one
zonal government official I interviewed insisted that “rather than being a legal
problem, social discrimination in places such as Dawro is a cultural problem”
(interviewed in Arba Minch, July 2000). But this was not just a problem of
ethnic minorities such as the Dawro; it was a nationwide cultural challenge
(Epple 2018) and in many ways a continental challenge (Constantin 1989; Evers
2002; Obinna 2012). Here political history gets perhaps its most troubled cultural expression. A range of distinct issues (pertaining to their origin and persistence) such as slavery, occupational stratification, kinship, and legacies of
kingship all intractably intermingle here.
In Chapter 2 I outlined that while Ethiopia fiercely resisted European colonialism and neocolonial desire for cultural domination, the Ethiopian empire
remained a slave owning society for much of its extended tenure. It is also
important to note that the intent to abolish slavery goes back to the beginning of
modern Ethiopia when Emperor Theordos II declared slavery illegal in the 1860s
(Marcus and Hudson 1994). Every succeeding Ethiopian emperor also made,
partly in response to a changing international context (e.g., to be accepted in the
League of Nations), some effort at outlawing slavery in the empire. However,
not just slavery’s longstanding legacies but the practice itself lingered in Ethiopia until the 1974 revolution (Allain 2015; Marcus and Hudson 1994; Levine
1974). While Ethiopia’s encounter with slavery and its legacies are yet to be
fully understood, a few points are established well enough. Most notable are:
(1) slavery was practiced in the majority of east African societies (Sudan being
the most notorious, holding the practice until the present era); (2) in Ethiopia,
the highest ‘consumers’ of slaves were the Christian highlands, which also
happen to be the self-proclaimed core of the Ethiopian mainstream; and (3) the
region that later came to be known as the Ethiopian periphery (both politically
and geographically) was the primary source of slaves.1 This history, coupled
with the modeling of modern Ethiopian national identity on a narrow core of the
highlander Amhara cultural ethos, created a nation that denied equal citizenship
to non-Amharic speaking ethnic communities and their members in the south,
east, and western regions (see also Donham and James 1986; James et al. 2002,
Smith 2013). The subjugated ethnic communities resiliently held on to their
respective ethnolinguistic identities and cultural practices, partly as resistance
against the reality of political marginalization and cultural subjugation.
While Ethiopia’s imperial policy held together a weakly integrated empire for
as long as it could, by the late twentieth century new notions of citizenship were
needed in which different cultural identities were recognized (Donham 2002).
The 1974 overthrow of the Ethiopian monarchy and subsequent declaration of
the wholehearted adoption of socialism promised new conceptions of nationalism and citizenship. Although Ethiopia’s socialist regime (1974-1991) put an
end to extreme structural injustices upheld by Ethiopia’s monarchic regimes
such as landlordism and de facto slavery, it failed to meaningfully address
identity-based demands for equal citizenship. In the words of the late Kinfe
Abraham, an authoritative EPRDF mouthpiece, “… Mengistu’s [leader of Ethiopia’s military socialist state] fatal error was that he fiddled with the shadow of
the nationalities question, but he never really addressed it” (Abraham 1994, 7).