The Impermanency of Royal Capitals in Ethiopia

Akalou Wolde-Michael* The Impermanency of Royal Capitals in Ethiopia Ethiopia, in the course of its long and eventful history, has had more than fifteen different royal capitals.1 Changes of capitals are not, of course, unique to Ethiopia. Persia, Egypt, China, and, to a limited extent, the United States have shifted their capitals a few times. The remarkable feature of Ethiopian capitals was that with some exceptions they lacked aspects of permanency in their formative process. This has led observers to think that the Ethiopian cultural and physical milieu was such that the development of a fixed capital was impossible. For example, when the German scholar, Hiob Ludolph, read about the founding of Gondar in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, his reaction was that it was doomed to disappear.2 Count Gleichen after visiting Addis Ababa, the present capital, near the end of the nineteenth century predicted that sooner or later the capital would move elsewhere.3 * Doctoral Candidate, University of California, Los Angeles. 1 The term capital, though always refering to a place, has two underlying features : its function which is the seat of the political authority of a territorial unit and its external attribute as a city. Too frequently die term is used in a way implying some kind of basic unity between the two features. This is understandable since the relocation of a center of political authority had in the past almost invariably resulted in urban growth and/or expansion regardless of whethei the new area had an urban bast: initially . However, in Ethiopia the chief locus of government in die past has not always been a city, and governmental functions have not always led to new urban development . ' Hiob Ludolf, A Ne«; History of Ethiopia. Translated by J. E Gent. London: 1682. p. 215. 3 Count Gleichen, With the Mission to Menelik—1897. London: Edward Arnold, 1898. p. 158. 147 148ASSOCIATION OF PACIFIC COAST GEOGRAPHERS The particular circumstance that contributed to the persistence of such a view was the belief that there was a cause and effect relation between the scarcity of wood and the impermanency of capitals. It was the Portuguese Father, Manoel de Almeida, who first suggested this idea and established the pattern for much that was to follow. In the early sixteenth century Almeida wrote: "These changes [of capital sites] are made so frequently in the first place because it costs [Ethiopians] little to build houses, then because [of the emperor 's] different wars and very specially because of lack of firewood ."4 Later in the seventeenth century Hiob Ludolph remarked, "The Habessines [Ethiopians] wonder to hear of so many great cities among us. For they do not believe the country can afford timber and food sufficient for so many houses."5 Sylvain Vigneras, a member of French delegation to the court of Menelik II, who came to Ethiopia toward the end of the nineteenth century said, "I used to attribute [mobility of capital] to the needs of activity and movement of people who are used to camp experience," but he later said, "Today, I think I have found the key to the enigma," which according to him was, "The Emperor shifts his capital elsewhere when there is no more wood in the area."6 The narrative reports of the nineteenth century are filled with similar statements. Recently another writer compiled evidence relevant to the issue that "This scarcity of firewood was mainly responsible for the lack of permanent royal residence ."7 Unhappily, the notion of scarcity of firewood does not adequately explain the phenomenon of impermanency of capitals, because first it fails to account for the existence of permanent capitals and ultimately fails to recognize the importance of history. The migration of Ethiopian capitals can be appraised as more of a function of historical factors than of purely material or locational factors. A brief examination of the southward displacement of Ethiopian political centers reveals a close relation between the stability of the territorial state and the permanency of its capital (See Figure 1). 4C. E Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford (editors), Some Records of Ethiopia (1593-1646), being extracts from "The History of High Ethiopia in Abassia" by...