Amharic Cultural Reader (review)

Amharic, the African-Semitic tongue that is the working language and lingua franca of Ethiopia, is the vehicle of one of sub-Saharan Africa's most prolific vernacular-language literatures. However, Amharic writings are virtually unknown in Western Africanist circles, most likely because Amharic is an extremely complicated language and "the challenge of Amharic" is too great for the interested scholar. But in the last decade or so, two mammoth instruments de travail appeared that can be of great service and inestimable value to the aspiring amharisant—Thomas L. Kane's 1990 two-volume Amharic-English Dictionary of 2.351 pages and Wolf Leslau's 1995 Reference Grammar of Amharic, 1044 pages (condensed version, 2000, with 232 pages). No superlatives suffice to characterize these works.

Even when the "surface structure" of an Amharic text may be clear, however, often the "deep structure" (semantics in the broadest sense) remains elusive, as the external sociocultural referents and value systems are not understood by the scholar. As is known, Ethiopia was secluded for centuries in her mountain fastnesses, "forgetful of the world by whom she was forgotten," isolated, brooding, and xenophobic. There developed, then, a unique, closed, and hermetically sealed culture and society that even now is not well understood by the cultural anthropologist and/or sociologist. (Perhaps the most famous—or should we say infamous?—work on Amharic culture is Donald Levine's Wax and Gold (Chicago: U of Chicago P) of the early 1970s, right before the Ethiopian Revolution, then later slightly revised. Leslau's Cultural Reader should help in this matter. Some twenty Ethiopian-Amhara students of his were asked to write short essays on various of the most important and central aspects of traditional Amharic material and spiritual culture, notes de passage, customs, values, food and drink, dress, etc. These texts appear here in their original Amharic (at times slightly edited), but, more important (perhaps), in a very fine, meticulous and detailed English translation done by Leslau's protégé and true connoisseur of all things Ethiopic, the late Thomas Kane. (Indeed, the Reader is dedicated to his memory.) True, the texts were all composed in the heyday of the late Haile Sellassie's reign and are thus somewhat dated now. Still, they provide the scholar and student of Amharic literature with much useful ethnographic information. As always, Leslau is to be congratulated and thanked for yet another of his myriad labors of love. Now in his nineties, he is certainly the Grand Old Man and le grand maître of Ethiopian studies.