Gleaning Ethiopia

One can glean so much information from the billboards that dot the streets of Addis Ababa. A major artery like Bole Road, for example, is lined with oversized texts and images that advertise local and foreign goods; government and NGO messages; the latest movies and music hits; boutiques, cafes, computer schools, and agencies for tour and travel. Some ads exploit sentimentality or humor to promote their goods and services, or imbue a product with heightened norms of gender, color, and beauty, or with symbols of national pride and exception.

There is a tourism billboard near Olympia that animates for me questions seldom raised in Ethiopia. The billboard crops and yokes together from a common repertoire of images-Addis Ababa's skyline, Axum's standing stelae, and a half-nude Mursi woman-an Ethiopia at once modern, ancient, and primitive. The suggested message of the billboard is spelled out further in an Ethiopian Airlines tour brochure, which relies on the same images as the billboard and the following text to index parts of Ethiopia:

Axum:

Fly to Axum, a town steeped in more than 2500 years of history. From the palace and tomb of King Kaleb (6th C, AD) we will visit the extraordinary stela (UNIESCO World Heritage Site) and tomb of King Remhay (1st to 4th C, AD). Followed by a trip to the church of St Mary of Tsion, (17th C, AD the present church) in which deposited [is] the Arc of the Covenant.

Mursi:

Drive to Mursi and visit ethnic groups. Excursion to the Mursi people via Mago National Park. These people are curious and famous in that the women wear geometrical lip plates in the slits of their lips. The men practice fierce stick fighting.¹

Although meant for tourist eyes, both the billboard and the brochure are representative of how northern and southern Ethiopia are figured in the nation's dominant visual and popular culture: the north is vested with history, the south is ahistorical; the north has time, the south is atemporal; the north is authenticated, the south is authentic; the north gazes upon itself, the south is gazed upon; the sites of attraction in the north are grand and sacred places, while in the south they are wild plants, game, and "these curious people."

For a country that prides itself on defeating a European colonial power and maintaining its independence, it's ironic that some of its self-representations reflect Europe's long-standing image of Africa as a static site of primitivism against which one hones definitions of progress and modernity. Furthermore, like European tropes of Africa, these characterizations seize hold of the body-often an over-sexualized body-to employ spectacles of primitivism.

A range of critical discourses-postcolonial, critical race and cultural studies-has taught us that the making of western modernity was contingent on a devalued, supplementary "other" (i.e., the Orient, Africa, etc.). Moreover, it's given us a language with which to critique the set of practices and institutions that continue to perpetuate different forms of western hegemony. However, it would be a mistake to superimpose on Ethiopia overarching theories, terms, and categories that emerge out of particular (i.e., Atlantic world) historical formations and intellectual milieux-for, that kind of flyby comparative approach glosses over the interior senses that make a place tick. Inadequate as they are, nevertheless, the above discourses offer a critical perspective with which to consider power, and could help us probe local forms of hegemony in Ethiopia, including the insidious ways the nation others "these" Ethiopians based on color, creed, ethnicity, culture, and language.

Perhaps one way of thinking about the north/south distinction so pervasive in Ethiopia is to reflect on the nation's fraught, continental identity, particularly the terms it favors to characterize other "black" Africans. The pejorative term one hears privately as well as publicly for "black" people within and without Ethiopia is barya. Although the term doesn't have the same juridical meaning it once did, it immediately recalls the power relations that once buttressed Ethiopian slavery and furthermore continue to shore up today's ethno-cultural hierarchies. As the historian...