What Were They Writing About Anyway?: Tradition and Modernization in Amharic Literature

Introduction: Where it all Starts

When we hear the word "Ethiopia" even today, when globalization is the ruling edict of the day, what we still have to grapple with is a persisting enigma: on the one hand, we have this image of remoteness buried in the recesses of a past that had been as enduring as it had been glorious-a wonderland of natural bounty, whose people have been described as so "blameless" that they were beloved of the Greek gods who made frequent visits to them, led by none other than the thunderous Zeus himself; a people at whose "banquet side Poseidon lingered delighted," as also did Iris "to partake of the rites to the immortal gods."¹ This perception of the country still lingers with an even stronger grip on the psyche of poets and politicians alike, extending its reach further into the past-this time around, as the "enviable origin" of the human race.

On the other hand is the dismal reality of poverty and backwardness that the country represented when it crossed the threshold of the twentieth century a hundred years ago, and still had nothing significant to show for it all. This is what ailed the early twentieth-century writers who voiced their concerns directly (by addressing their ideas of change to the powers that be), or indirectly through fictional works in the didactic tradition. Granted, so they seemed to say, that its past had been as glorious as it could never have been, but where did it all go? Where did we miss the turn that other nations were quick to recognize and embark on, leaving us out in the cold, while we, its children, still boast of the thirteen months of sunshine in which we alone seem to bask? Or, were we that loath to part with our bumpy ride on our dignified mules, rain or shine?

In words that seem to echo those of Diodorus about the Ethiopians "being the first to honor the gods" and to be "endowed . . . [with their] favors," (Snowden 146) and at the same time wondering loudly as to what stopped us dead in our track, Aleqa Tayye Gebre-Maryam wistfully asks what seems to have been an unavoidable question in a letter to Emperor Menelik II. Writes Gebre-Maryam:

It is the Almighty God, impartial in His ways, Who created the children of Adam and the whole Universe. In so doing, He did not bless one part of humanity with a fully-developed intellect while ushering out the other with only half. The Holy Book tells us that He created all people equal. If that be the case, how come then that the peoples of Europe and Asia, and some in Africa, managed to acquire learning and wisdom, while we, the Habashas, who, as distinct from the non-believers, were the first to receive the Laws of Moses and who, circa 308 A. D., had already become Christians, could not press forward in acquiring enlightenment both materially and spiritually?

(qtd. in Admassu et al., 161-2; emphasis added)²

Behind the supplicatory tone of Gebre-Maryam's words with which he addressed a number of suggestions to Emperor Menelik as solutions to the country's ailment is couched a helpless feeling of dejection and anger at the incredible complacency of its people no less than its rulers. How could a country that had been boasting "uninterrupted independence and sovereignty over millennia" still remain steeped in a culture of ignorance at the threshold of the second millennium when the rest of the world (including even "some in Africa"!) was making impressive strides into the future? Even more embarrassing, how could this same country consider itself sovereign when at the time Gebre-Maryam wrote his "modest" letter (and even much later at the time of Taferi-Haile Selassie) the Maria Theressa Austrian taler was being used as the main currency for commercial transaction? Couldn't Menelik have ordered the minting of a currency bearing his name and image so that his "free" state could be self-reliant and more vigorous? (qtd...