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  • The Call to Addis AbabaThe Editor's Notes
  • Charles Henry Rowell

In “’Older Than the Flow of Human Blood in Human Veins,’” I recounted the circumstances that occasioned the 2010 Callaloo Conference and the special issue of Callaloo (33:1, 2010) devoted to Ethiopian literature and culture. I will not rehearse that history here, but I will repeat some facets of my editor’s notes in the special issue: the international implications and significance of the conference, as they relate to the focus that the conveners set for the July 5-9, 2010, gathering at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. Is it possible that, by mounting seminal international conferences on the African Continent, Callaloo is opening up a space that calls for an overdue dialogue between Africans on the Continent and their descendants in the Diaspora? Our meeting at Addis Ababa University might have signaled that need.

The 2010 Callaloo Conference began with the host and the conveners speaking about the nature and purpose of the five-day gathering. This was an informative moment, which framed the conference as an international event of exchange between two worlds—Ethiopian and North American; it was also a spiritual moment of return to the land of the misremembered ancestors, whose voices we did not hear but whose presences we felt. I have no doubt that each one of us who took that 8,000-mile flight to Addis Ababa and participated in the conference was not only intellectually fulfilled; each of us was, in some way or another, spiritually transformed by what we did and experienced in that ancient land—a revered site for many of us in the African Diaspora.

As I described in my editor’s notes in the special Ethiopian issue of Callaloo, while I was visiting the university in 2009, the Director of the Institute and other university intellectuals invited me to return to Addis Ababa and to bring with me the Callaloo Conference group. The opening ceremonies were the beginning of my answer to that call to return. In the presence of Ethiopia’s Crown Prince, Be’ede Mariam Makonnen, we opened the gathering in the Throne Room of Emperor Haile Selassie’s Guenet Leul Palace, which now houses, among other things, the Addis Ababa University’s Institute of Ethiopian Studies, along with archives conserving ancient artifacts that mark stages of the evolution of that ancient nation. Dr. Andreas Esheté, the University President, and Dr. Elizabeth Wolde Giorgis, Director of the Institute, welcomed us, and the planners of the 2010 Callaloo Conference took turns in laying out the framework of the five-day gathering that would follow. To mount our opening ceremonies in the Emperor’s Throne Room in the company of the Crown Prince was itself historic. For me, the ritual of opening the conference was itself a profound spiritual moment.

I do not think, however, that I was alone in having a deep emotional response to the opening ceremonies; I have no doubt that many, if not all, of us from North America felt a certain pride in the privilege of being received and welcomed in the last Emperor’s Throne Room, now the people’s room, which was once the seat where matters of state were conducted and justice meted out. Emperor Haile Selassie’s Throne Room, a site of times past [End Page 814] and present, suddenly became one of future tense for the opening ceremonies—as would the conference events that followed—signaling what I hope will become a sustained cooperation, on matters of mutual concern, among African artists and intellectuals and their counterparts in the African Diaspora. There we were in the Throne Room—where Elizabeth Wolde Giorgis brought us to answer her call, where the voice of an African Monarch had once become a symbol of the African Continent and an image of pride throughout its Diaspora. From the University President’s welcome we knew that we had returned from the Diaspora to our ancestral home where all humanity, in fact, had its beginnings.

As descendants of enslaved Africans whose lives and ways of life continue to be dominated, in the main, by...

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