Myths and Realities in the Distribution of Socioeconomic Resources and Political Power in Ethiopia (review)

The field of Ethiopian studies is a stuffy attic desperately in need of fresh air. Original interpretations based on factual evidence are hard to come by; this book does not make progress in that direction, not because of a lack of intent, but because the evidence brought to bear simply does not prove the author's argument. Kasahun Woldemariam argues that the Amhara were not a privileged ethnic group in Ethiopian history and that the current regime has accepted this idea of historical privilege and set about trying to right historic wrongs with catastrophic effects. In doing so the author has set a high bar for gathering historical evidence that would prove the point, and disproving the work of many other scholars of Ethiopian history.

That goal is stated in the introduction, after which the book digresses into a discussion of democratic institutions and development policies. Only in chapters 5 and 6 does the author begin to tackle the issue of disproving Amhara domination. But the statistics he uses do not provide sufficient evidence. For example, examining the percentages of students enrolled in various kinds of schools during the Haile Selassie era, he finds that a higher percentage of students in the south were enrolled in private schools than elsewhere; he concludes that since private schools were better than government schools, people in the south were better off. Apart from the fact that this seems to prove the fact that the government invested more in the north (the Amhara area), the reader is not given the percentage of schoolage children enrolled in school in each province. This is just one example of the unconvincing use of evidence to support the author's argument. Moreover, as the author never details which ethnic groups live in which provinces, readers without prior understanding of the political and ethnic geographies of Ethiopia will be hopelessly lost.

Other points also ring false to those familiar with Ethiopian history. Arguing that the term "Amhara" was used to denote someone as a Christian, Woldemariam then describes the use of the term "Amhara" to denote an ethnic group as the work of "contemporary political entrepreneurs." It would be more accurate to say that the change occurred around 1900 or even earlier. While group boundaries were fluid because of intermarriage and assimilation, the implication that this group was formed only recently, out of the government's ethnic policies, stretches credulity. So does the repeated claim that the multiethnic character of Eritrea was revealed only in the mid-1990s. Perhaps this fact became apparent to the author at that time, but certainly it was known to any serious student of Eritrea: one need only recollect the famous Eritrean People's Liberation Front poster of one large fist surrounded by nine smaller fists—obvious reference to the nine ethnic groups of Eritrea united within one Eritrean national identity.

Kassahun Woldemariam does make the important point that the vast majority of Amhara people in the countryside suffered terribly from impoverishment, along with everyone else in the country during the regimes of Haile Selassie and Mengistu Haile Mariam. However, noting that the suffering masses included Amhara does not prove the point that he needs to if he wants to make a good case for the "myth" of Amhara domination.

One unsettling problem with this book is its failure to address information that would weaken the argument of the author. He chooses not to discuss the land issue during the era of Haile Selassie, saying only that the issue of the appropriation of the lands of southern peoples has been exaggerated. This is a shocking omission, as it is perhaps the most serious evidence of ethnic oppression in Ethiopian history. In regard to the issue of language, the author argues that the prominence of Amharic culture and language is "simply symbolic," noting that Haile Selassie promoted other...