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Rewriting Ethiopian History

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Année 2002 18 pp. 37-54
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Page 37

37 Annales d'Ethiopie, 2002, vol. XVIII: 37-54

Rewriting Ethiopian History

Christopher CLAPHAM

Introduction: the familiar tale of Ethiopian history

'History' is the story of the past, told from the perspective of the present. As the present changes, history changes with it, because even if the past is, in one sense, entombed beyond the possibility of alteration, the constantly changing present leads us to ask different questions about it, and to put it together in ways that seek to make sense not only of the past, but of ourselves and our present predicaments. Sometimes this changing quest may be guided by explicitly political agendas - like the attempt of the European Union to rewrite the history of Europe, but from the viewpoint of integration, rather than of national state formation, or the construction of African histories as the tools of 'nation-building' exercises designed for the classrooms of newly independent states. Often, it simply reflects different ways of looking at the past, which themselves derive from the ideas that we are currently using to make sense of the present; Marxist historiography is a case in point. But everywhere, history changes.

But to this trite generalisation, Ethiopia appears to be a striking exception.1 Ethiopia itself has changed dramatically over recent decades, through the decline and fall of the old imperial system, to the massive upheavals of the early years of revolution, the attempt to construct a Marxist-Leninist state, the growth of regional resistance movements, and most recently the independence of Eritrea and the transformation of the rest of Ethiopia's political structure into a system of ethnic federalism. Changes in Ethiopian culture and society have been equally great. Yet the historiography of Ethiopia has for the most part remained quite astonishingly immune to upheavals that might well have been expected to make us look at Ethiopia in ways very different from those that convention has established. Despite extensive criticisms of this conventional historiography which are discussed later in this paper, when we pick up a History of Ethiopia, even the most recent, we know broadly what to expect.2 Starting perhaps with a ritual

1 This paper was completed before I had seen any but an early, and subsequently much changed, text of Alessandro Triulzi, "Battling with the Past: New Frameworks for Ethiopian Historiography, in Wendy James & al., eds, Remapping Ethiopia: Socialism & After (Oxford: James Currey, 2002, pp.276-88). Remarkably, given our very similar subject matter, this overlaps very little with the present paper; and I can strongly recommend it as a very sensitive study of the problems of writing Ethiopian history at this time. 2 See, for example, Paul Henze, Layers of Time: a history of Ethiopia (London: Hurst, 2000); Harold Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994); Richard Pankhurst, The Ethiopians: a history (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). For earlier versions of essentially the same tale, see A.H.M. Jones & Elizabeth Monroe, A History of Ethiopia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935); Margery Perham, The Government of Ethiopia (London: Faber, 1948); Edward Ullendorff, The Ethiopians: an introduction to country and people (London: Oxford University Press, 1960).

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