Ghosts of the Mesafint: Contemplating Conflict in Eritrean-Ethiopian History

Introduction and Overview

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it aims to provide an overview of the cycles of conflict that have characterized the history of the Eritrean-Ethiopian region, focusing in particular on the period since the late eighteenth century and including the 1998–2000 war between the two states in question. It seeks to examine the significance of warfare in this region in shaping local as well as regional and ultimately national identities, and in forging economic as well as political and cultural relationships over the past 200 years. Second, the article aims to highlight the role of warfare and cycles of conflict in African history more broadly, placing the region under study in a wider perspective. In so doing, it is the aim of the article to emphasize the importance of war as a key historical determinant in Africa, and to explore the nature of war as a political tool and a form of expression of identity. On one level, the article traces continuity in the patterns of bloodshed and local struggle from an age of chronic decentralization and quasi-"republican" polities acting in the name of a royalist ideal, to the age of imperialist expansion, both monarchical and ideological, to the modern era of sovereign states and their competition with one another in the process of state formation. On another level, the article is a cautionary tale, warning that the importance of warfare in both Africa's past and its present should not be underestimated.

The article is derived from the author's ongoing research on the culture and practice of warfare in precolonial eastern and northeastern Africa. In a region characterized by recurrent violence and conflict, it is critical to explore the causes and motives behind such warfare through time, and the nature of the conflict that has to a very real extent defined political and economic relations across the region under examination through the early modern and modern eras, that is to say, from the eighteenth century to the present day. It is my aim here, as suggested by the title, to link together the various kinds, and the particular stages, of conflict that this region has witnessed since at least the 1760s. It should be noted, however, that we need not necessarily deal with these stages in conventional chronological order, even though all history begins, of course, with the dead themselves.

Our survey encompasses the collapse of the relatively unified Christian state of the Ethiopian highlands through the course of the eighteenth century, giving rise to an era of political fragmentation and recurrent warfare known in Ethiopian historiography as the Zemene Mesafint, or biblically suggestive "age of the princes." It is the "ghosts" of this era that appear to have haunted subsequent generations, for the era itself is taken to epitomize much of the region's modern history. Certainly, the problems and issues of that age—typically assumed to have lasted from 1769, with the murder of the emperor Iyoas, until the rise of Tewodros in 1855—can be seen to have haunted the region ever since. Those problems include the forces of regionalism, expressed in more recent times in a nationalist context, in the frequently destructive and very often inimical centralizing "tradition" and the forging—indeed, deliberate invention—of local identities through violence and the force of arms. These issues need to be examined in the context of the Zemene Mesafint itself, and then pursued into the modern ("imperial") age, beginning with the notoriously violent Tewodros, who spent much of his reign suppressing revolt and attempting to contain or preempt resistance, as would many of his twentieth-century successors. In a similar vein, it is necessary to look at the violence of the reigns of Yohannes and Menelik, the empire builders of the modern age and the chief representatives of an era that witnessed the drawing of the lines of battle between the centralizing state—this is indeed when "Ethiopia" was born—and regional identity, the latter sometimes concerned with the inheritance of the empire and sometimes with its destruction.

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