Charting Out Ethiopian Modernity and Modernism

Background

Any meaningful discussion of modernity, modernism, and modernization in Ethiopia has yet to take place among Ethiopian intellectuals. Scholars have attempted to talk about the projects of Ethiopian modernity, in a narrow range of meaning that neglects to construct the processes of modernity within the discursive space of its multiplicity and cultural specificity. Not only does the discourse lack the focus of the metanarrative of modernity, that of the methodological, archival, and theoretical requirements particular to modernist studies, but the theoretical charters of many Ethiopian intellectuals also falls short of looking at the totality of the political, social, and cultural phenomena of Ethiopian modernity, within the paradox shared by all non-Western modernities. Conventional preconceptions by Ethiopian historians of modernity and modernism are often confused with processes of modernization complicit in projects of nation and Empire. Hence, the discourse of Ethiopian modernity has often been informed by the socioeconomic phenomena of modernization in the context of development and where modernity, modernization, and Westernization are considered identical.

For instance, in Bahru Zewde's Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia: The Reformist Intellectuals of the Early Twentieth Century, a seminal book for being the first document of Ethiopian intellectual history, the author deliberates on concepts of modernization in different parts of the world and particularly in Japan. The book gives a historical account of Ethiopia's interaction with the Western world to come up with lists of early intellectuals that were acclimated to Western education. Without articulating the broad historical movement of modernity, the book freely interchanges notions of modernization theory with modernity, short of producing a coherent framework that situates Ethiopia and Ethiopian intellectuals in the scaffold of global modernity politics. Instead, it generates a narrative of modernization which expresses the vision, most successfully implanted in the mass consciousness of post-war Japan. This book, which is a primary document that details the contribution of modern Ethiopian intellectuals, therefore falls short in accounting the disciplinary identity and purpose of modernity as an inquiry of thought and experience in this period of the "modern" that is covered in the book, and as a form of historical consciousness. Modernity and modernism, therefore, have often been used in Ethiopian scholarship to signify Europeanization and Westernization. Modern or modernity is nevertheless a spatio-temporally-based concept which is not constituted by fixed sociohistorical traits. It is on the contrary shaped in a contested space of decisions and actions in which ideas are unremittingly critiqued and revised.

Furthermore, epistemological insight to bear on the notion of the "modern" and the meaning of modernity in African societies particularly requires the investigation of European modernity within the climate of Europe's colonialist aggressions. The agency of Africans in fashioning their own modernity shapes itself in a continuous space of contestation that critically engages European projects of modernity, its history, and its intellectual tradition. The question then is how to frame the discourse of Ethiopian modernity and modernism in an intellectual history that has neglected the evaluation of these important issues in the making of modernity. Although Ethiopia has never been colonized, I argue that the interrogation of Ethiopian modernity has in the main manifested itself in the dichotomy of "Other" and "Otherness." The question of "Otherness" as a central moral and political issue is one that cannot be ignored and its predicament extends itself to self-questioning that was usually attended by a sense of acknowledgement of alterity. This alterity was at once highly local in its engagement with the urgent political and social problems of Ethiopia and widely pertinent in its confrontation of the ethical demands of "Otherness."

Whether Ethiopia was colonized or not, the belief of "Otherness" prevailed because just like any other non-Western society, Ethiopia was posited by the West in a Eurocentric archetype that has historically excluded discourse of alterity and that perceived subordinated groups from the point of view of a dominant "first world" culture. I will further elaborate this in the works of the writers of the newspaper Berhanena Selam and in Gebre Hiwot Baykedagn's work Atse Menelik and Ethiopia (Emperor Menelik and Ethiopia) to investigate the...