So much nonsense is repeated about the country and its past, we might as well have the responses ready to fire back.
Nov 12, 2024
Today, I read an article by Simon Vera for The New Humanitarian which brazenly claimed, “The Amhara have historically dominated economic, cultural, and political life in Ethiopia: Ethno-nationalists see their community as the embodiment of “Ethiopiannness.”
Besides the disingenuous slur of conflating Fano and Amhara advocates with “ethno-nationalists,” these lines are also a sleazy trick, since the “Ethiopianness” isn’t backed up by any proper sources—it just links to an article more than a year old in The Africa Report without a byline. And nothing backs up this claim there either. So Vera says it’s so because this source says it’s so… with no proof. And the wording is lifted so wholesale that one wonders if he wrote that Africa Report piece himself.
But its main contention is not even close to true. And it gets inserted into so many articles time and again that it needs to be fought with facts. I’ve tried to fight this creeping bullshit over X and Facebook, I’ve put out videos against it, but I thought it might be useful to whip up a very quick guide for handy reference to hit these idiots over the head with every time they do this.
Ethiopians, like every other people on Earth, love to quibble about their history, which is rich and fascinating. So, fair warning here, I am not putting out these bits, claiming they are the end all and be all and the last word on the issues involved or a complete summary of events. They are just to quickly demolish the nonsense and falsehoods getting regularly funneled into mainstream Western news reports.
We could go on and on and quibble over details, but let’s handle the worst slanders in broad strokes:
1. “Amhara dominated economic, cultural and political life in Ethiopia.”
False. And stupid—because ever notice how when they write this, they never define when this was supposed to have happened? They can’t because that would mean having to actually learn about the historical periods through the centuries, and then they would find out they’re wrong.
The truth is that through the centuries, ethnicity mattered far less than religion right up to the 20th century. In the 1600s, for example, Susenyos was captured by Oromo early in life, became fluent in their language and their methods of warfare, and was so good at these that once he was emperor, he used Oromo tactics, enlisted some Oromo groups as allies and shuffled around certain populations as community “buffers.” (See Richard Pankhurst’s Ethiopian Borderlands.) During the Zemene Mesafint, the so-called “Era of Princes” in the 18th century, the Oromo Yejju Dynasty dominated the court even as regional leaders jockeyed for power and increased their spheres of economic influence.
Most respected historians of Ethiopia will tell you it wasn’t Amhara who dominated political life in later centuries, it was the nobles in Shoa, and even then this doesn’t sum up everything. It was a case of “Let’s keep it all in the family,” a point made by historian Shifferaw Bekele (“Reflections on the Power Elite of the Wärä Seh Mäsfenate (1786-1853).”
As Shifferaw wrote, Menelik’s wife Taitu had family connections in Yeju, Lasta, Wollo, Begemder, Gojjam, and Semien, and “in later life, there was practically no family of importance to which she was not related either by blood or marriage.”
Yohannes IV was Tigrayan. Menelik, whose ancestry was mixed and is argued over by historians, appointed as his successor Lij Iyasu, the son of an Oromo-descended Muslim apostate. Haile Selassie’s mother was a princess with Oromo ancestry.
So no, the “Amhara dominance through the centuries” claim is rubbish. Knock it off.
2. “The region of Welkait has always been part of Tigray.”
Bull. This is a particular obsession of academic Jan Nyssen, whose specialty used to be soil, as in dirt, until he discovered he could make a name for himself misrepresenting Ethiopian geography. One of his favorite tricks is to invoke maps used by the Italian Fascists as proof that Welkait was always Western Tigray, which would be like trusting Nazi maps of Poland. You would think a Belgian would be more sensitive to that issue, but he isn’t. I’ve written about Nyssen’s hobby horses before, and virtually his entire case is built on the premise that European cartographers know Ethiopia’s geography better than the people who live there.
But his case crumbles when even quick checks of white European sources prove he’s wrong. “The name of Tigray is now commonly applied to the whole country east of the Tekeze River where the Tigray language is spoken,” wrote English visitor and future diplomat Mansfield Parkyns, “though formerly only a district north of Adwa was so called. In the same manner, the province of Amhara gives its name to all the country west of that river.” This is from his Life in Abyssinia, vol. 2, published in 1853. East of the Tekeze is the key phrase—the river used as a natural border point, because of course it would be!
I have in my possession the official history of the British Forces’ liberation campaign of East Africa in 1941, and in the maps provided, the area is clearly marked and referred to as Welkait. No ifs, no buts. This is an official publication of the British Government, so you can bullshit all you like, but as late as 1941, everyone knew what the proper name of the area was and where it was.
3. “The Oromo were oppressed, ethnically cleansed/it was their country first, etc.”
No, it wasn’t their country first. We know almost exactly when the Oromo showed up because we have a sharp observer for when they did. This is Bahrey, a monk in Gamo in southern Ethiopia, who set out in 1593 to write a history of the Oromo and their invasion. Bahrey wanted “to make known the number of their tribes, their readiness to kill people, and the brutality of their manners.”
Kind of an awful, biased way to start, isn’t it? Yet even historians of the Oromo concede that Bahrey got many of his facts right and was reasonably fair in his depiction of Oromo culture. Asmarom Legesse wrote in Oromo Democracy that “Bahrey’s aim was not to denigrate the Oromo, but to reveal the source of their strength, so that his king could do a better job of mobilizing the Christian kingdom on the same scale that the Oromo had done.”
Just where the Oromo came from is a whole other controversial issue, but it’s my own personal belief that it hardly matters in a political context today. Oromos have been integral to Ethiopian history for centuries. Oromo cavalry served and bled at the heroic Battle of Adwa. Some of the greatest Patriots who liberated the country from the Italian Fascists were Oromo. Oromos have as much stake in the country as any other ethnicity.
That doesn’t, however, mean we need to give a pass to the more batshit crazy contentions of the ethno-fascist ideology of Oromuma. While it is true, for instance, that many Oromo were sold into slavery, so were Gurages. And one of the favorite themes of extremists is to pick on Menelik II.
This is because Menelik—to expand his domain and to keep paying his hefty tribute to Emperor Yohannes IV—led an ambitious southern campaign to take back the lands acquired over time by Oromo groups. Today, gullible Western reporters who don’t bother to crack a book at a library will just repeat what some moron has told them in an interview about Menelik. Even common sense should tell them that no, Menelik did not commit genocide.
How can we be so sure? Because the evidence is virtually nonexistent. Consider how one Oromo historian likes to peddle the claim of a French missionary that Menelik’s forces slaughtered five million people. It’s absurd. This same missionary thought there once could have been as many as 25 to 30 million Oromo in Ethiopia—this when in 1870, France—a developed nation that hardly had the same infant mortality, famine, disease, etc.—had only 36 million people. So, unless the cleric got on a mule and did his own census, this is silly. And as I’ve pointed out before, if there were massacres anywhere even close to this figure, we would have found the victims. Bones and skulls were found years after the Battle of Segale, the Italian massacre at Debre Libanos, and the TPLF’s use of mass graves in Welkait.
4. “Meles Zenawi and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front did economic miracles.”
Oh, what a crock. And every Ethiopian knows it. The only ones who write or say this without laughing are white Western journalists and TPLF revisionists.
To torpedo this nonsense, let me cheat a little and swipe three paragraphs from my own account of the 2020-2022 conflict, The Hyena War. You can find the article sources for these paragraphs at the very end because unlike Vera, I can back up what I write.
“The largest enterprise in the land was the Endowment for the Rehabilitation of Tigray (EFFORT), which soaked up huge aid contributions from the U.S. and was eventually run by Meles’s widow, Azeb Mesfin. TPLF officials sat on the boards of major companies, having no problem with getting loans from the state-owned Commercial Bank of Ethiopia and Development Bank of Ethiopia—loans they never had to repay. Despite the horror stories of persecution circulated by TPLF apologists in 2021, it was an open secret to Ethiopians that for major business licenses or contracts, Tigrayans were picked first. In Afar, locals had no control over their land and made precious little from the crucial salt trade.
“The regime even kept its own home base poor. Tigray remained one of the poorest regions in Ethiopia. In the year that I first visited the country, 2013, Ethiopia was receiving an annual $3.5 billion in foreign aid, which made up roughly half of the country’s national budget. And yet little of that was ever seen by ordinary citizens, let alone those in Tigray. The TPLF had created a generational kleptocracy, with officials investing their wealth in shopping plazas in the States and sending their sons and daughters to Ivy League schools like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
“In 2005 when a diaspora radio station did an exposé on TPLF corruption, government officials filed a libel suit in an American court. But Meles Zenawi soon ordered that it be dropped because the radio station had a brilliant checkmate move: it demanded that TPLF officials ‘declare all their wealth before and after they came to power in Ethiopia’—right down to the bank account numbers within thirty days—for the court to inspect. It also had a leaked document that apparently gave a detailed breakdown of the officials’ wealth. Meles himself allegedly had $41 million parked in the Bank of Malaysia. Ambassador and later Foreign Affairs Minister Berhane Gebre-Christos had $19 million at an account with Citibank. And on it went.
5. “Haile Selassie knew about the 1970s famine and did nothing.”
Wrong—slanderously wrong. Bashing Haile Selassie’s conduct during the famine has been a favorite libel for historical revisionists, but it still ain’t true.
What is true—thanks largely to the investigative television reporting of Jonathan Dimbleby—is that the government at the time did cover up the extent of the famine and its responses to the crisis ranged from incompetent to criminal. As Dimbleby said in a follow-up TV documentary, “The Ministry of Agriculture reported six months in advance that the spring of 1973 would bring famine to Ethiopia. The government suppressed the report. In the Ministry of the Interior, some knew and kept quiet.”
But it’s also true that junior officials pleaded for help from international agencies, and while yes, aid got brought in, they helped cover it up—something revealed by a journalist named Jack Sheperd in his book called The Politics of Starvation (he unfortunately still got facts about Ethiopia’s 1930s history wrong).
Funny how the aid organizations’ complicity never got a lot of media play.
The question then is how does the emperor figure into this? Yes, you can make the case as Dimbleby did in his report that since it was the emperor’s government, the buck really stopped with him. But the evidence suggests that officials tried to keep the facts from him for as long as they could get away with it. When Haile Selassie visited one of the worst hit regions, Wollo, he was genuinely appalled by what he saw, and his responses support the idea that he’d been kept in the dark.
He grilled officials and lambasted, among others, his own son since the Crown Prince was the governor of Wollo. Another person facing his ire was Dejazmach Solomon Abraha, who handled provincial affairs. “And while the famine was decimating the people of the province,” he scolded Solomon, “you were busy carpeting the road from Kombolcha to Dessie with reeds in preparation for Our arrival, uttering not one word about the victims.” (Tekalign Gedamu, Republicans on the Throne.)
Dimbleby himself has publicly criticized how the Marxist Derg manipulated clips of his documentary footage for a special broadcast to Ethiopians, a ploy to make it appear as if the Ethiopian royal family was oblivious to the starvation of the people. He called their edits “crass.” (See Dimbleby’s appearance in the Grandpa Was an Emperor documentary.)
6. “Haile Selassie stole money from his own people.”
This is a lie recycled from the Italian Fascists, who first used it to smear the emperor as he fled into exile. It wasn’t true in 1936, and it still wasn’t true in the 1970s. After Mussolini’s thugs moved in and began slaughtering Ethiopians, the emperor and his family lived practically hand-to-mouth in a drafty mansion in Bath.
The author of Imperial Exile, Keith Bowers, once told me a great story of how the director of the city’s local power company visited Fairfield House, intent on making Haile Selassie pay his overdue bill. Walking into the main floor sitting room, he found the emperor in a chair with a blanket over his knees. The director decided to drop the issue on the spot.
Decades later, the top guns of the Derg tried to learn where Haile Selassie had supposedly stashed a fortune, and bank official Taffara Deguefe was present when they accused him of funneling $14 billion into overseas accounts.
“Fourteen billion dollars!” replied the emperor. “From where would all this money have come from? And for what purpose would We keep it abroad? To live in exile? We have seen and experienced exile.” (Taffara Deguefe, Minutes of an Ethiopian Century.)
As Asfa-Wossen Asserate pointed out in his biography of Haile Selassie, Ethiopia’s entire budget in 1974 was $320 million U.S.—“the German city of Frankfurt in that same year was 2 billion marks.” (Asfa-Wossen Asserate, King of Kings.)
Whenever I bring up the facts over these last two items, somebody makes the laughable claim that I’m somehow a closet Ethiopia monarchist. I can’t be bothered to roll my eyes over that one anymore. I just wave a tired hand at my post about monarchy, which you can read here. The more important point is—
Each of these lies and falsifications persist because of laziness. All a reporter (or those academics who also peddle them) need to do is pick up proper source texts from a reasonably well stocked public or university library and read. And read widely. Not just one book, damn it, read several! In the case of the TPLF’s phony “economic achievements,” reporters can find the evidence contradicting this claim right online through 15 minutes at most of diligent research.
But they don’t. And I know why. Because it’s easier (and lazier) just to run with what your interview source told you. To clip from articles you already know, especially those with your own news organization. And the intellectual slovenliness ultimately says far more about the reporter than it says about the nation being covered.
It also speaks to yes, outright damn racism, because when you do this shit—make stupid, easily correctable mistakes on African history, sweeping, ignorant generalizations about a group’s goals or intentions—you assume that no African is reading your work. Well, they are. And while I can’t and never would presume to speak for them, I’m pretty sure they’re not impressed.
My hope is that they run out of patience. That they get in your face and confront you with your nonsense the same way that pro-Palestine advocates are now challenging the narratives of the New York Times, BBC, MSNBC and all the rest.
Someone I enormously respect suggested that I am perhaps too critical, implying that those of us on the side of targeted Amharas need to be selective in letting some errors or statements pass while focusing on the good, on the fact that attention is finally turning on the Amharas at all. I don’t want to be too dismissive of this, because this person, who is brave, committed and in many ways a hell of a lot smarter than me, has a point. I can see what they hope to do.
But in the end, I must reject their argument, even as I hope I haven’t lost a friend in the community.
Because no people ever got ahead or advanced their civil rights by compromising the true narrative of their own struggle and history. While it is true that these are not my people, Ethiopians call me their brother and pay me the greatest privilege of including me, occasionally consulting me to help.
So, if I didn’t call out the stupidities and malicious slanders of white Western reporters then by default I would be aiding and abetting their harm through silent indifference.
If my work and my voice has any usefulness at all, it’s in the fact that I can speak up and say, “Yeah, I’ve worked in journalism, I know what they’re trying to pull.”
And I will always say: DON’T LET THEM GET AWAY WITH IT.
Sources for Section on TPLF Economic Miracles:
Ethiopia is Looted by EFFORT and the TPLF Business Empire,” Ethiopian Times, 30 July 2012; Matthew McCracken, “Abusing Self-Determination and Democracy: How the TPLF is Looting Ethiopia,” Case Western Reserve International Law, 36, no. 183, 205-207; J. Bonsa, “Crony capitalism and the myth behind Ethiopia’s economic miracle,” Opride.com, 15 July 2015
“Premier Zenawi, others sue four Ethiopians in USA for libel,” Sudan Tribune, August 8, 2005
“Meles Zenawi Died Without Owning a Personal Car or House?” Tesfa News, June 6, 2015