Essence and Contingency in the Construction of Nationhood: Transformations of Identity in Ethiopia and Its Diasporas

Diaspora 2:2 1992 Essence and Contingency in the Construction of Nationhood: Transformations of Identity in Ethiopia and Its Diasporas John Sorenson Centre for Refugee Studies, York University 1. Introduction Exile is experienced as a separation from one's true place in the world, from that place which provides rootedness and meaning. To become an exile is to be uprooted, set adrift, disconnected. Yet this is not simply to inhabit a dead zone of loss and estrangement, for exile is also a fecund space for elaborating new forms and ways of organizing experience, creating new affiliations, associations, and communities, for developing new identities. As exiles create new diasporan communities, they typically engage in communal reconstructions of their experience and jointly formulate specific forms of identity, based on ethnic, regional, or national affiliations. These formulations employ or take the forms of myths, particularly those related to homeland and return. Mythic constructions explain and order the experience of exile and counterbalance the profound sense of loss that accompanies it. To describe as myths these forms of remembering, of constructing new shared identities, and of formulating particular visions of the future is not necessarily to dismiss them as illegitimate aspirations, false versions of history, or invalid types of identity, but rather to emphasize their social character. Myth should be understood as a semiological system, an organized narrative that gives meaning to events. Myths are not relics of some antique past but mechanisms for organizing experience and reworking the present. This essay explores the conflict between ethnic and national identity in an imperial state that is multiethnic and multicultural. It also analyzes the renegotiation of identity in a diaspora actively concerned with the homeland. The focus is on the creation of exile communities in Canada and on myths of homeland and return among one of the world's largest refugee populations, made up of those who have fled Ethiopia during the last three decades, during which convulsive warfare and devastating famine ravaged the Horn of Africa. 201 Diaspora 2:2 1992 2. The Ethiopian Diaspora Africa has had millions of refugees in the last 30 years, and Ethiopia has contributed one of the largest concentrations in that refugee population. Although several hundred thousand people have now repatriated, there were still approximately 750,000 Ethiopian external refugees and 1 million internally displaced in 1992. Most are from the northern regions of Eritrea and Tigray, who fled westward into Sudan, but large numbers also fled southeast to Somalia and Djibouti. Many, especially peasants, have been stranded in squalid camps, but from all these areas there has been a wider diaspora ofrefugees, migrants, and exiles dispersed throughout Europe , the Middle East, and North America. Ethiopia has also been at the center of a regional vortex of human misery, as refugees from Sudan and Somalia have crossed into its territory to escape similar conditions of political violence, hunger, and disease in those countries . Although their needs have been as great, large numbers of internally displaced people have not been recognized as refugees and therefore have not received international assistance. War, political repression, ethnic tensions, poverty, and famine created the diaspora from Ethiopia, where political power and cultural hegemony were concentrated in the Christian Amhara and Tigrayan elites of the northern highland regions, who directed the expansion of the empire in the nineteenth century; during this period , the culture of the most numerous linguistic group, the Oromo, was denigrated. The highland elites asserted the unity and antiquity oftheir state, claiming direct descent from the Axumite empire, which had flourished in the fourth century A.D. This formed the central legitimizing myth of the Amhara kingdom. However, there was no direct continuity; Axum was succeeded by independent kingdoms in different regions, and the Amhara only came to power in the thirteenth century. Both empires did espouse Christianity, which has played a key role in Ethiopian culture. The myths of direct continuity of the state and the idea of Greater Ethiopia were challenged by various nationalist movements . The most significant of these was that of Eritrea, the former Italian colony (1889-1941) on the Red Sea coast. Following Italy's defeat in World War II, Britain administered Eritrea, pending a decision...