Meles
Zenawi: Historic or Mythic Ideologue?
__________________
Indiana University
Fall, 2012
Abstract
It
is the purpose of this article to theorize the politics of mythologizing ideology in Ethiopia and examine mourning as a metaphor centering
on the late Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia. Mourning
for the deceased is believed as one way of maintaining a strong social cohesion
with the living while it also serves a common good to appease the spirit of the
deceased. My argument opens on the premise that traditionally grieving is
mainly social than political/ideological for the general public while it is also
personal and emotional for the deceased family. Bruce Lincoln’s notion of myth as ideology in a narrative form helps
to recapitulate his valuation of transition from mythos to logos leading
towards the revival of myth as a means of creating a narrative that supports a
certain ideology. In Lincoln’s (1999) study the biggest qualm, however, is how
the logos-laden scholarship differs from mythology, a very prevalent issue more
pertinent than or equally important to demonstrating a method of comparative mythology. Since not all
mythologies date from the days of ancient cultures, I posit, people around the
world continue to create new myths for various purposes, or refashion existing
myths. Based on credible data, my own prison
narrative, and other available documents in print, in this study I revisit
the notion of the Great Man Theory to
challenge the validity of Mele’s
legacy as a “Great Man” and theorize the current politics in Ethiopia from an Oromo
perspective.
Keywords:
Oromo; Oromia; Ethiopia; Modern
Mythmaking; Ideology; Great Man Theory; Mourning Metaphor; Autoethnography;
Historicity
Introduction
On
August 31, 2012, the Salale horsemen came to the colonial Grand Palace all the
way from Sululta, 20 miles northwest of the capital, Finfinnee, as ordered by the
local officials to mourn for Meles Zenawi, who misruled the Ethiopian empire for
21 years with iron fist. Mourning traditions in Africa vary by country, religion,
and peoples even within the same empire like Ethiopia where there are over one
hundred national groups. In Ethiopia, while providing food for the mourners is
a common practice, funeral songs accompany the narratives of mourning to honor
the deceased. Grieving and visitations last for a week or more. Horsemen
decorated in a heroic insignia carry spears and shields to pronounce the heroic
deeds and ventures of the deceased, praise him by outlining his activities,
trace genealogies that so and so is from a strong breed, while women join in
singing and mourning to honor the deceased.
Although
mourning rites and customs vary from culture to culture and to religion, the
overriding theme is universal, that is, to honor and respect the deceased.
Among the Salale Oromo, professional lamenters are paid to perform funeral
songs to eulogize and commemorate the deceased folk. In what follows, I try to
examine the act of mythologizing ideology
by epitomizing texts of mourners and narratives of reporters who served so
well to feed data for or to critique the mythologizing effect, characters and
deeds selected for the mythmaking out of Meles Zenawi’s legacy in Ethiopia to
the status of everlasting icon.
This
article problematizes that to describe an episode of history, one need to be
acquainted with the appropriate information in the historical source and put
them in a suitably constructed text, a
story or narration about the episode, which is in effect, a real meta-story not
myth. This disambiguation process involves one such recent experience from
Ethiopia, namely, a state funeral that
has brought to the public the myth made around the late Meles Zenawi as a
“Great Man,” a demigod. Towards that end, based on credible data and my personal
testimony, I argue, the evils of Meles make him a dictator who committed crime
against humanity. By comparing data from
two competing ideologies in modern mythmaking in Ethiopia, I conclude that
“great men” were/are merely products of their social environment, and the
genesis of the “great man” is the result of the social state into which the
nation has slowly grown. The Salale Oromo funeral songs are used in light of the
negativistic myth theory to
demonstrate that the recent “state funeral” metaphor in Ethiopia is such a
modern myth that reveals dictatorial leaders
who are driven by their own ego also inculcate in the minds of their followers
they are born to lead.
Mythologizing Ideology1
It
is a common occurrence to take human figures and let the culture
anthropomorphize them, strip them of their tangible humanity and re-sculpt them
as ephemeral mythic figures. When they pass away, they are epitomized like
virtuous human beings, “As virtuous men pass mildly away,” as John Donne once wrote
in a different context in the poem “Forbidding Mourning”. Such mythic figures
are eulogized to the point of caricatures of their former selves. We know that
humanity is bounded by several inescapable life forces in cosmos and death is
something that has to happen. People cannot decide on whether or not they want
to die or just live forever. Death is an inescapable force for a statesman so
much as it is an irresistible but a relief for the homeless, a vagabond. Of the
death of the statesman, mourners say his time has come to die while others say
it is not, as if the deceased had choice to live and rule them continually.
Myth tells humanity that everything in cosmos is bounded. If humanity could
choose to live by the thought of being bounded, man could live happier (Bascom
in Segal 1996:2).
Folk
heroes, adventurers, and bandits all we admire for their exploits or despise them
for their wicked acts are mythologized in some way and memorialized for
generations to come according to their deeds. Robin Hood is a Sherwood mythic
figure as Henry McCarty aka Billy the
Kid is a folk hero in the history of the American west (Hobsbawm, 1969, 2000).
However, what selects one figure to attain immortality via his/her
transformation from flesh-and-blood person to a mythic folk hero as Agari Tullu
and Badho Dilgasa of the Salale Oromo is a different historical and ideological
array of their times.
Maybe
one rebelled to denigrate what was constructed on falsity as a factual history
and sacrificed his/her life to resist repression and injustices. And, another
comes to power performing the obligatory ritual, but stepping over the bones
and blood of the martyrs as Meles Zenawi did, to vow a solemn oath to reverse
the past and avoid the marginalizing old system and to reconstruct history on
the basis of freedom for all! It is
this ideologized mythic vision of common good that becomes a mythologized
ideology around the same liberator anthropomorphized into a demigod or, more
preferably a “momentary god”. The “special gods” never came home from the
bush! They were fodders for the cause to advance, oils for the shell to propel.
Only “momentary gods” come and go!
On
the flipside of the story is another story: by lucky accident, by historical
coincidences or deliberate protection, one mythic figure comes to cherish the “new
light” of history to shine on him/her. It always remains mysterious, however,
how this figure rose above the crowd when dozens of other, perhaps more
notorious and deserving heroes, were available, or systematically removed as
the same can happen in every society. It is not the purpose of this paper, to
explore what documented events or aspects of his life as a rebel leader laid
the ground for Meles Zenawi and set his supporters to forge facts into fancies
of imagination and requisite characteristics of myth around him as a Great Man.
My aim is, using the notions of myth as
ideology in narrative and the Great
Man Theory, to contextualize and examine as metaphor the mourning performed by the Salale Oromo,
the reporters’ narratives and other sources
vis-à-vis my own prison narrative.
The Salale and other Oromo horsemen from around the capital, Finfinne, Addis
Ababa, who came to mourn Meles’s death, were peasants grief-stricken and
desolated by Meles’s land grab policy (Jaatee and Mullata, 2012).
Myth, Language, and Metaphor
To
examine the notion of mythologizing
ideology requires a coherent and meaningful conceptual construction of
framework that involves an interdisciplinary method and a comparative approach.
Methodologically speaking, working theory-free on a demanding topic such as
this would risk ending up in a superficial speculation about the topic. However, a thorough investigation of
such a broad topic would be constrained by time and space as big pressuring
factors.
By
some myth theories, man, unlike animal, perceives the universe by creating
symbolic meanings (Lincoln, 1999:171ff). In so doing, man puts meaning beyond the reach of direct
sensory perception, and the meaning is veiled in the ambiguity of language. The
question is, is ambiguity in language
or in myth? For if ambiguity is
inherent in language, at least to my understanding, disambiguation is inherent in myth. The reason being, the purpose
of myth is not to mystify but to
demystify! The parochial Salale horseman, as they would call him, who chose
Oromo language, as we will see later, to mourn the dictator before the
metropolitan cosmos was parading to humanity the demystification of the ‘will
to truth’. Once again, the same conflict of interest between the Oromo horseman
and the ETV reporter at the Grand Palace is the center of the mythologizing
ideology project.
One
of the key issues in the political program of the Oromo oppositional political
party, the Oromo National Congress,
in Ethiopia has been the legislating of the Oromo language as an alternate
national language in the country. To problematize language and metaphor in the
process of mythologizing ideology is also to examine the negativistic theory of myth2 used unfairly
to eulogize and concretize the historicity of the Machiavellian political
crank, the late Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, who murdered Oromo civilians
summarily and kept in jail more than 25, 000 Oromo prisoners of conscience
during the last two decades (cf. Human
Rights Watch Report, Oct. 2010). Before
I turn to interpreting the Salale allegorical mourning songs at the imperial Grand
Palace and the reports, in the next section I present the Great Man Theory to challenge the relevance of Melels’s legacy in
Ethiopia.
The
“Great Man Theory”
The
Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle declared (1841) that “the history of the
world is but the biography of great men” (Eakmann, 2005:4). If Carlyle is right,
this assumption is true in Ethiopia. In Carlyle’s view, a leader is the one
gifted with unique qualities that capture the imagination of the masses. It may
be also true that great leaders can arise when there is a great need. By this theory some people are born with the
necessary attributes that set them apart from others and these traits are
responsible for their position of power and authority. It is because of their
special endowment and traits that remain stable over time and across different
groups that great men deserve to be in power, which leads to a belief that
truly great leaders are born not made. According to this approach, great
leaders share those special endowment and unique, stable traits regardless of
when or where they lived, which derives from the trait theory of leadership that leaders “are born and look, act,
and lead by preset, often genetic fundamentals” (Ekmann, p3 citing Northouse,
2004). Hence, the great man theory posits
that heroes shape history through the vision of their intellect, the beauty of
their art, the prowess of their leadership and, most of all, their divine
inspiration.
Generally, there are two major assumptions around the Great
Man Theory: leaders are born and not
made; and great leaders will arise
when there is a great need. The first assumption is about the origin of the
“Great Man” out of a “strong breed,” whereas, the second derives its basic
tenet from the mythic domain that in times of need, almost by magic, a “Great
Man” would arise. Examples in the case
of the latter are people such as Gandhi, Churchill, Alexander the Great, and religious
heroes such as Jesus, Mohammed, and Budaha. Thomas Carlyle strongly believed
that effective leaders were a package of divine motivation and the right
personality.
By
a negativistic theory of myth, that
is, by theory of myth that critiques and explains the occurrence of myth in
terms of error, the mythologizing of ideology “naturalized” the metaphor of
mourning to eulogize unfairly the “dictator(-ship)”. A negativistic theory of myth deals with the
occurrence of myth in error, i.e. ambiguity being the basic shortcoming of
language (Cassirer 1953). The role of having shared language in mythmaking is
as important as mythologizing ideology through interpreting the metaphorical
mourning of a dictator(-ship). It is the point where language makes a sharp
contrast between myth and history, and myth and ideology. The
issue of language as a metaphorical tool and ideology as an overseer master in
the mythologizing process in this study is crucial in determining the
validation of myth.
Myths
as narratives, as formative or reflective of social order or social values
within a culture serve a society to positively revitalize themselves. And by negativistic theory, an oppressive state
can put myth to an error by reenacting fantasies instead of facts and
inculcating its absolute power over the subordinate as the Nazi socialist party
did as or as Francisco Franco of Spain mythologized his authoritarian regime. To
show a negativistic myth theory, it would suffice to mention Dumezil’s
tripartite scheme of myth theory,3 which he
used based on hierarchy to justify that the Indo-European race is most orderly
and, therefore superior to other human society (Lincoln, 124). It is important
to note that, ironically, out of Dumezil’s “most orderly” Indo-European race, fascists
like Hitler and Mussolini emerged to put myth to a mythologizing effect of suppressive
ideologies.
One
who argued earnestly against the concept of the Great Man Theory was the
sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) who succinctly and rightly sated that
great leaders were products of the atmosphere and society they worked and lived
in. Spencer believed that society was shaping the Great Men, and not the other
way around. Hence, one can infer that it is a “Great Myth,” not a “Great Man”
that engraves in our souls almost instantly and crowns authoritative figures to
determine our fate on our behalf. As if they were irreproachable human beings,
their leadership qualities in their absence are to be replicated to become
successful. By critiquing the “Great Men” subscribers, Spencer meant that they
are not “born leaders” or not the results of their “Godly motivation and
personalities” but they are great leaders who certainly evolved out of their
experience, education, personalities and social context in which they lived.
However, by Thomas Carlyle’s Great Man Theory, no one can become a great leader
other than being born a leader.
It
can be unmistakably true that a leader is a hero or heroine who accomplishes
goals against all odds. To be a great leader, one needs to have high levels of
ambition coupled with clear visions of where now, and precisely where to
go. By the “great man theory,” to be an
effective leader, important traits include typical masculine traits, which have
been refuted as an androcentric bias.
As there were no any women given opportunity to rise to power in the 19th
century or before (except few, e.g. Joan of Arc of France, the Russian Empress,
Catherine the Great), when the need arose, it was not by coincidence that the
theory was named “Great Man Theory”. A leadership that is collaborative and
inclusive could be more effective than the one that is authoritative (Eakmann,
2005). As a general fact, great men in history came from the aristocracy
because the lower and middle class were rarely given the chance to exercise
power, which caused early researchers to represent the reality and posit that
breeding had something to do with leadership (ibid..). There are leaders who
are driven by their own ego and inculcated in the minds of their followers they
are born to lead. Napoleon expressed his feelings of being a leader as saying
he would have “an army of rabbits led by
a lion than an army of lions led by a rabbit” (Bass, 1990 in Eakmann,
2005). That is what the late Meles
Zenawi and his cadres did, namely, to make the peasantry take things for
granted, believe the single story they were told over and over again that they
were liberated. However, it is a fatal mistake to take peasants by the songs
they perform, the stories they tell.
In
this section it has been argued that the Great Man Theory was a belief that
individual leaders who, due to their personal charisma, intelligence, wisdom,
or Machiavellianism, utilized (and/or abused) their power in a way that had a
decisive historical impact. In this view, individual heroes shape history
through their personal attributes and inspiration, intellect, beauty of their
art, and divine inspiration. This view was critiqued on the ground that it
attributes historical events to decisions of individuals. “Great men” were merely products of their
social environment, and its geneses depend on the long series of complex influences
which have produced a nation in which the ‘great man appeared’. He is the
result of the social state into which the nation has slowly evolved. By this
analysis, Meles was not a ‘Great Man’ but a colonial dictator who brutalized
the Oromo by engaging them in tension, genocide, forced exile, family
disintegration, dispossession of their resources and human rights. In the next
section, it is my purpose to expose the evils of Meles Zenawi using credible
available sources and refute the historicity
of Meles’s legacy followed by the analysis of the Salale dirges on the state funeral orchestration.
Meles Zenawi: Historic or Mythic Ideologue?
Things are not what they appear to be always. Dictatorship, with
all its perverse and lurid appeal, is radiated all by its sheer evil. And
dictators, burying their cunning acts and false promises in their callous
words, are much more intriguing and alluring than mythic heroes. In Ethiopian
history the sordid saga of dictators and dictatorship is an epic soap opera
populated by such eccentric characters as Theodros and Menelik in the 19th
century Abyssinia, and Haile Sellasie, who marked exotically the end of
Solomonic dynasty in Ethiopia by the length of his reign. Meles Zenawi came to
power in 1991 and made a solemn oath with other liberation fronts, including
the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), to democratize the nation after the 17-year
fierce popular resistance against the Derg military regime of Mengiestu Haile
Mariyam. Meles proved himself an outrageous despot in the turn of the century
by dispelling actual democratic forces and allies out of the Transitional
Government in 1992. In Ethiopian history, those despotic figures, including
Meles, were larger than life and came to be part and parcel of universal
folklore in the Western world and not known by their evil acts as by their
ingeniously lenient charismas. One recalls the journalist Abebe Gelaw’s
protest, which made this fact bare, against the perverse presence of Meles
Zenawi at the G8 summit on May 18, 2012 and humiliated him in front of world
leaders and other African heads of state. The incident marked a tragic
penultimate trope of the mythic Great Man theory about Meles Zenawi to the
grave.
Those
despots often considered themselves necessary (but often seen necessary evils)
and even messiahs, at times seemed
genuinely possessed in the supernatural, heavenly-sent. The constant paradigm being
that the individual demigod’s ego was exalted above the interests of the entire
ethnonations and, in the process of ‘hi/story’ formation (not transformation),
reiteration and filtration in Ethiopia, history became like a daisy chain of
whispered “pass it on” throughout the successive regimes. Following the egotistic misrule of warlords or monarchs and
dictators, the Ethiopian mainstream history became a top-down chauvinistic
chronicle, unscientific, fuzzy, part gossip, part propaganda, part hearsay, and
part theory often supported by unsubstantiated attributions or outright
fabrications, which, I dare say, is an utter mythmaking and/or mythologizing
ideology.
The external legitimacy of Ethiopia/Abyssinia has been based on the
role of its dictatorial regimes, such as the late Meles Zenawi who served as an
agent for the world capitalist states and left the people merely in abject
poverty, recurrent famines and underdevelopment and, the country a dependent
client-state (Jalata 2010a). Consequently, the Ethiopian regimes lacked any
internal legitimacy from the people (the ethno-nations) whom they forced into
the empire state at gunpoint and held the grip of power for decades to retain
absolute Abyssinian domination on the ethnonations and achieve external legitimacy.
By the same token, the EPRDF regime led by the late Meles Zenawi has been
unable to consolidate social coherence, mutual trust and partnership among the
people but rather drove the country into poverty and political instability. To
ensure peace and stability, Meles used every coercive force possible.
The Evils of Meles Zenawi
Meles Zenawi continued the authoritarian policies of his
predecessors’ particularistic ideological foundation of Semitic ancestry and Abyssinian
political culture by drawing heavily on external political legitimacy (Jalata
and Schaffer, 2010). In history the Euro-American intervention backed the
Amhara-Tigre successive state elites in Ethiopia at the cost of other
ethnonations in the empire by providing both a legitimating discourse and means
of extracting resource (HRW 2010; Jalata ibid, p161ff). The Western
intervention disrupted the parity of power in the region nearly for centuries
in favor of the Amhara-Tigre rulers and elites to expel or exterminate the
Oromo and other ethno-nations.
The reason for expulsion or extermination of the Oromo is part
politico-religious and part economic. During the unequal historical
relationships with their rival Semitic Orthodox Christians (Amahara-Tigreans)
in the 19th century, the Wallo, Yejju, Asabo and Raya Oromos had
accepted Islam not to be “swamped by Abyssinian nationalism” (Trimingham,
1965:109, cited in Jalata, ibid). The Ethiopian rulers had long feared both
Islam and the Oromo (ibid), the two names being “their recurring nightmare”
(Baxter 1978, cited in Jalata, p162). Both the expulsion and extermination of
the Oromo began under Menelik in 1880s continued through the Derg military
misrule which used resettlement (and revillagization) to subdue resurgent
forces and disrupt the Oromo demographic upsurge (HRW 1991:211, 229) in the
region. Meles’s regime used the Derg’s ethnic assortment for its
divide-and-rule policy by mobilizing armed Amhara-Tigre settlers and Somali and
Garri into Oromia (e.g. Gari and Somali in the Borana Oromo region in the
south, and Amharas in Gidda Ayana, in the west).
When the minority Tigrean-led EPRDF came to power in 1991 under the
Euro-American tutelage, there was fierce resistance throughout Oromia against
the takeover of power by the neo-Abyssinian force. However, there was a
consensus reached with the OLF (and OIF) that the EPRDF would maintain law and
order and “allow the expression of popular aspirations without resorting to
indiscriminate violence” (HRW, 1991:353). Accordingly, the two Oromo Fronts
(OLF and OIF) on their part were to ensure that
“the legitimate demands of the population were not channeled into
violent resistance as long as options for democratic participation were open
(ibid), which was indefinitely closed by pushing the OLF out of the national
election in 1992 (Jalata 2010). In his
study Asafa Jalata (2010) makes plain the hidden agenda of Meles and his
collaborators that since 1992 his government has been attacking the Oromo and
robbing the resources of Oromia to enrich Tigrean elites and their partners and
develop the Tigrean region (p46). Towards this end, Meles’s regime implemented
for the last two decades a variety of strategies and tactics which include
highly militarized and repressive state structure, tight grip on information
and media outlets, exploitation of foreign aids and domestic financial
resources (HRW, 2010) as through nondemocratic political appointments.
For the last two decades the Oromo have been targeted, repressed
and terrorized by Meles’s regime because they resisted against the Tigrean
policies, defended their economic resource, and accepted the OLF as their
vanguard political organization and their leadership to bring to an end their
plights (Jalata 2010:51). Not only the Oromo but also other ethnonations (e.g.
Somali, Sidama) have been brutalized under Meles’s regime and his predecessors (Hameso
2006). The genocide against the Anyuak people in Gambela is one of Meles’s
unforgiveable atrocities committed against humanity in the age of freedom and
democracy in the 21st century. Mohammed Hassen (2002) brought to
light Meles’s hidden violence perpetrated against civilians and detailed the
accounts of conquest, tyranny and ethnocide committed by the Amhara-Tigerean
successive regimes against the Oromo as a genocidal act of terrorism. Citing credible sources, Asafa Jalata clearly
notes that there have been between forty to forty-five thousand Oromo prisoners
under Meles’s regime (Jalata 2010:55), which I testify later as a prisoner of
conscience myself under Meles’s regime when I was teaching in Addis Ababa
University, Ethiopia.
Mourning a “Momentary God”: State Funeral
Death Myth
As
far as death myth is concerned, it is James Frazer who applied meticulously the
comparative method to the fall of man
in Genesis by examining origin of
death myths throughout the world to explain fully features of the Genesis story
(Frazer in Dundes, 1984). Hence, in Frazer’s view, among the many variants of
the origin of death in Africa, the story of the Wabende of East Africa is this:
one day, God whom they call Leza came down and addressed all living creatures,
“who wishes not to die?” to which only a snake answered “I do,” when every
creature was fast asleep (p72). And, according to this myth, that is why to
this day, snake does not die but sloughs its old skin unless it is killed while
man is subject to death (p89). After analyzing variants of “death myth” around
the world, Frazer’s conclusion is that, in the beginning, people pinned their
faith in immortality. However, when they were robbed the heritage which God or
nature bestowed on them by those little creatures like snake, lizards, and
beetles who can cast off their skin and never die, people naturally look on
those creatures as the hated rivals. Likewise, the Semites told their own
version of death myth in Genesis (p97). Such death myths and many other tales
are told during the wake and mourning either to comfort the deceased family or
simply to commune and empathize among mourners.
As
traditional societies have different rites and myth around death, one of the
funeral rites and mourning regulations among the followers of Islam is prompting
the dying one to say the Shahadah,
meaning, “there is no true god except Allah”. In some cultures the body is
cremated not buried while in Tibet the ground is not suitable for burial and,
instead, the “sky burial” is often practiced. That is, the body is fed to the
vultures and many rituals are performed for forty-nine days to prepare the
right karma for the next birth. When the North Korean the “Great Leader,” Kim
II Sung died in 1994, his successor Kim Jon Il ruled a three-year mourning
ritual (1994-1997) to commemorate his deceased father, and also to consolidate
his power so that the nation remains durable and resilient in hardships (Jeon, 2000). During the
mourning procession he practiced a traditional mourning ritual. In so doing he
won the hearts of the people and demonstrated the filial piety to his deceased
father as he elevated himself over the three-year mourning ritual period to a
position equivalent to the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung (ibid). By practicing
piety himself he emphasized loyalty and filial duties to the Great Leader and
ensued patriotism byway of mythologizing ideology. Thus, the metaphor of
mourning ritual can serve the ideology of a totalitarian rule as in Ethiopia
and also a hereditary succession as in North Korea.
In
a polytheist society such as the ancient Greeks who believed in a multitude of
immortal deities, some gods were “momentary gods” because they had only
momentary task to serve their master on his feast, Zeus, the sky god, the
supreme ruler of the gods and a rain maker. In its English version, the
etymology of a “momentary god” goes
to Herman Usener’s concept of the same Greek mythology (Cassirer, 1953).
According to the myth, the gods were needed only to chase away the flies during
the sacrifices to Zeus and Athena. Out of this specific purpose at a specific
time and place, the deities had no existence, which can be another case for “boundedness” in the cosmos.
By
the same token, in the Ethiopian political context, rulers come to power as “momentary gods” to serve unwittingly
the unalterable mythic god of the Abyssinian imperial crown rooted in the
mythographic Glory of Kings (Kebra
Negest). The Abyssinian “momentary
gods” come to power not only to chase away the “flies” but also to carry on
the mythmaking and mythologizing of ideology. In so doing, the Abyssinian “momentary
gods” maintain the Solomonic kinship line, the Lion of Judah, and imprint,
as if by almost a magic, the inescapable influence of mythic thoughts on human
psyche—wretchedness—the reason why governments do come and go, as “momentary gods” do, but the system
never changes. This mythologizing ideology makes another case for the negativistic theory of myth. The
following are typical examples of putting myth in error to mythologize a
suppressive ideology.
Mythmaking: Grand Palace
On
August 31, 2012, the Salale horsemen came to the Grand Palace to mourn the
death of Meles Zenawi. Horsemen decorated in heroic traditional costumes,
carrying spears and shields, pronounced the heroic deeds and ventures of the
deceased, praised him outlining his activities, acclaimed him as a Great Man before
his relatives who were dressed in black and sat on stage. A horseman came by
and saluted,
Mourner
I
-Mallee
leenca Itiiphiyaa dhaa
amma eecha dhqaxa egaa
Malle
abbaa hiyyeessaa
abbaa hirreessaa
gooftaa bara dheeraa
-Mallee
abbaa
hiyyeessaa
-Malle
Ethiopia’s all-time lion.
where are you heading at
our benefactor
our leader,
our everlasting master, Great Man
our benefactor
[text 1]
The
mourner is romanticizing the long-time ruler Meles as a “benefactor,” “Great
Man” and “Ethiopia’s all-time lion”. In so doing he conjures the mourning
atmosphere. His tone of lament is imperative as death is commanding, inflexible
and irreversible. When the reporter stopped
the lamenter, the metaphor of mourning and lamenting had to be stopped. The
lamenter’s high tone echoing across the Finfinnee Hot Spring (behind the Grand
Palace) was silenced as instinct no longer reigned supreme. From my experience,
the peasant lamenters were village officials paid to report any rebellion or
such misgivings and they were definitely ordered beyond doubt to come to the
funeral (cf. the Ethiovideo).
The
ETV reporter asked the lamenter in Amharic language to answer few questions
about the mourning in general and how he felt about the death of Meles in
particular. The horseman answered resolutely: Afaan keenyaan yoo tahe hin wayyuu? Meaning, would it not be better if we speak in our language, i.e., Oromo
language? The horseman’s question to the reporter is never too simplistic
or innocent. The Salale Oromo have neighbored the Amharas and have faced severe
repression under the Habasha rule and the Orthodox Christian influence, all
kinds of subjugation, both cultural and political aggression for over a century
and a half years. Notwithstanding all these facts, the Salale Oromo around
Sululta and to the north managed not only to foster their ethnicity and
ethnical affiliation, but also to preserve and articulate their language, Afaan
Oromoo, both in everyday and ritual contexts.
Mourner
II
In
the mourning song to follow the lamenter ruminates over the transitory nature
of life and mourns the futility of human existence as he outlines all the
activities purportedly Meles fixed such as a power supply, pure water, road and
employment. In the recurrent line “abbaa
hiyyeessaa,” meaning, “benefactor,”
every mourner ponders over the deceased so dear to him and became their idol,
their guide and direction as echoed in the lament next:
-yaa
abbaa hiyyeessaa
hiyyeessi
kooruu jammaree ….hooo
baadiyaatti ibsaa galchitee
baadiyyaatti karaa baaftee
daandii
makiinaa nuu tolchitee…hooo
-yaa
Mallasaa!
Booombaa
bishaani
nuu
galchitee bar…hooo
-yaa ijoolee, hojjedhaa
biiroo
keecha teechaii
jedha
Mallasaanii,…hooo
-yaa ijoollee, hin dagatinaa
an isin
gateetan deemaa,
jedha
Mallasaanii
-yaa
Mallasaa, yaa Mallasaa
yaa
nama fira baayyee qabuu
-oh, our
benefactor
the poor
is now proud….ooo
you gave
us light to the village
you
pave’ us road to the village
you gave
us road to drive car on
-oh,
Meles, how generous!
you gave
us pure water
you
know…ooo
-and he
said, work hard
don’t
shark
you
said….ooo
-and he
said, don’t loath
while
I’m gone
he said
-oh
Meles, one with ample friends
is so
quick to go away too often
[text 2]
The lamenter uses hyperbole like
metaphysical poets to show how kindness, wit or power fails to save in the face
of death as an irresistible life force. One who had everything to give and a
benefactor is but helpless and the very meaning of existence seems to be
pointless since to have friends, to do good and have power does not save one
from death. On the mourning, almost all the lamenters were men, and among the
Salale Oromo, I haven’t seen or heard of any women lamenter/performer on the funerals
I attended during my fieldwork in September 2009-July 2010.
By
historical cross-cultural similarities of lament, female lamenters were
condemned in ancient Greek tradition by tragedians such as Aeschylus as
‘barbaric’ where men did not lift up their voice nor beat their breast (Mukta,
1999:26) which is, conversely, a common practice among the Abyssinians in
Ethiopia, where in most cases lamenters are women who continuously beat their
breast dancing in a circle. Although the mourning rites and customs vary from
culture to culture and to religion, the overriding theme of mourning is
universal, that is, to honor and respect the deceased. Among the Salale Oromo,
funeral songs are performed by professional men lamenters who seat on horseback
and sing to eulogize and commemorate the deceased folk. Mourning the deceased
is considered as one way of maintaining a strong social cohesion with the
living while it also serves a common good to appease the spirit of the
deceased.
Hence, death is as old as humanity
and so are the rites and myths associated with it. The performance of dirge, elegy,
or funeral song as a genre has gone through a lot of developments, but outside
of the scope of the present study. Death
is also something that concerns everybody. Sooner or later everyone personally
faces it and also it brings loss and sorrow to every family and community. Hence,
rituals and songs and visitations connected with death are usually elaborate.
Adding examples of laments and narratives delays other data imperative for this
paper. Next I quickly proceed to presenting some reports by the BBC and CNN reporters around the funeral procession
and their valuations followed by the Human Rights Watch Report, October 2010.
The HRW presented a detailed analysis of human rights violations by Meles’s
regime, and with those analyses, I will come closer to my own testimony.
“Remembering to Forget”
The
metaphor of “remembering to forget” as embroidered in the recurrent motif “hin hafini, hin sobini,” meaning, “do not be absent, do not lie” is a
straightforward affirmation of “truth,” a disarticulation of a priori “truth-claims” and the undoing
of anything that the dictator(-ship) is remembered for and lives memorialized
ever. And the mourner and his companions repeat,
hin hafini, hin sobini
yaa Mallasi
yaada kee
nuu mullisi…
garuuyyuu….
don’t be absent,
don’t lie
oh, Meles,
or send us
your rulings…
So long ….
[text 3]
in
a call-and-response tone. In that case a metaphorical operation of “remembering
to forget” soon comes to a closure by saluting the aggrieved family and
relatives. About his wellbeing and care in the wonderland, the horsemen have
this to say:
si hin xuqinii si hin xuqini
nagaatti, egaa nagaatti
simbirri wacuu jammartee
nagaatti kaa nagaatti
be well be well
you rest in peace
it’s dawning on us
now be well you
rest in peace.
[text 4]
The
ideology of language, the metaphor of mourning, the disorientation of media
eventually hauled the track by the mesmerizing song: it’s dawning on us! Upon which the peasant lamenters’ (local)
ideology hinges. That is, using mourning as a metaphor, the mourner subtly
exercises agency under such a disempowering situation that, come what may, it
is dawning and hope is in the future! The mourning songs raise issues about
truth than falsity, presence than absence, parochial provinciality than
individualist cosmopolitan and, at the same time, an outright dismissal of the
rural/urban, oppressed/oppressor, ruler/subordinate simplistic binary
oppositions now all is temporally equal but ideologically divided in the city
conquered by Death squad.
Mourning
the dictator(-ship) exemplifies the mythologizing of ideology to the extent
that the social boundaries become increasingly fuzzy. The relation between
mourning and metaphor is obvious on another plane. That is, the horsemen are
descendants of the ancestors evicted in the 1870s when Emperor Minilek moved
his court from Entoto to the present site in 1878. The Oromo name of the
capital, Finfinnee, meaning “hot spring”
(holy fountain) was a ritual site for the Oromo of Ekka, Galan, and
Gullalle, until the three clans were expelled from their home. The horses
crashed the metaphoric extravagant inwardness imagined as being a heterotopia,
other space. Finfinnee represents the notion of a particular place, which
metaphorically represents a certain property of belongingness, another
comeback, embodying paradox, for metaphor is a trope of displacement.
Lamenting the “Renaissance Dam”
Another
metaphor of place and mourning is carried in the waadaa (covenant) pronounced by an elderly Oromo among the mourners
who pleads to act in unison to finish the Blue Nile Dam construction also named
the Renaissance Dam, to mean that it
is a “rebirth” for the Ethiopian nations and nationalities to develop
sustainably and securely in the region under Melles’ rule. To the contrary,
Egyptians have a different development plan centering on the Nile.
In
Egyptian mythology, the Blue Nile floods because of the goddess Isis’
lamentation over the death of Osiris. That is, she sheds so much tear that can
cause the Nile to flow all the way from the Abay basin in the northern
Ethiopian plateau to Egypt. Thus, by this mythology, Egyptians believe, the
Nile is an ocean of Isis’ tears. Metaphorically, the Nile which the mourning
Oromo horsemen vow to dam has been one of the Millennium development goals and
a bone of contention between the two countries, an unresolved and complex
millennial Ethio-Egyptian dispute. Such a thought-provoking history is simply
mythologized by the mourner, as if by an overflow of emotion, who vows to dam
the Nile in a memory of the deceased dictator whom he sentimentalized as a
demigod, an immortal but a “momentary god”. As the political innocence of the
peasants is taken for granted the anthropomorphizing of Meles as a Great Man
born to lead the nation is accepted, categorically taken for granted but only
momentarily.
When
one nation holds myths tight to justify property right over the Blue Nile,
other sticks to history and geography to claim the lion’s share. Thus both myth
and history serve to mythologize ideology for the subjects to play with:
-Abbayin in gaddabna!
In gaddabna!
-in ijaarraa!
In ijaarra!
-waadaa dha!
Waadaa dha!
the Nile dam will be a reality!
Yes, it will be a reality!
Yes we can!
Yes we can!
This is a covenant!
Yes, it’s a covenant!
[text 5]
The
mourners at the ritual site are performing a mourning ritual. Through
performing the lamentation horsemen experience the renewal of the ideological
wholeness until they return from the metaphorical death everyone shared with
the deceased and re-emerge out of the eschatological realm to re-enter their
society as initiates. The mythic journey of the mourner as initiate requires
the eschatological renewal of the waadaa
(covenant) with the spirit of the deceased as carefully orchestrated by the
officials.
Among
the Macca Oromo, there is a persisting tale of such a forced mourning during
one rainy season in the turn of the twentieth century. It is called customarily
“bara duula Abbaa Xoonee,” literally,
during the war of Abba Toone, to mark
an event (e.g. a date of birth). Abba Toone was the leader of the Mao. The Mao,
the speakers of Mao language, one of
the northern groups of Omotic languages, live in the southernmost of the
Benishangul-Gumuz Region in western Ethiopia (González-Ruibal 2012). A Dutch explorer Juan Maria Schuver
is said to have travelled to the area in 1880-1883. According to my mother, Aragash
Sambta Tokkon, who said she heard the story told when she was young, the Sibu Oromo
were forced to join the battle against the intruder, Abba Toone of Mao, in the rainy season. And thus they scolded him,
yaa Abbaa Xoonee,
garba gadhee gadaanii!
Manaa nu yaaftee
ala nu dhaabdee
ganna gadhee kanaanii…
oh, Abba Toone,
Such a mindless rogue you are!
that you instigated war
drove us out to battle
in this dark gloomy rainy season….
[text 6]
They
restated the involuntary situation and pedantic war and regretfully recounted the
loss of farming season held up by war. Similarly, the Salale horsemen were
forced to mourn a dictator(ship) during the rainy season, put in the liminal
space between separation from home and, coincidentally, re-assimilation as
forced mourners at the Finfinne Hot
Spring near the Grand Palace where death is historicized, ideology is
mythologized and the “subject” is initiated as a Great Man. Now, the question is, is it a Great Man or a Great Myth?
State-funeral Reports
As state funeral is greatly influenced by tradition and
protocol, there are strict sequences of events to follow, but much of the
events are determined by family desires in line with the will of the deceased
and the official protocol. Outside the immediate family’s mourning, much of the
mourning procession and funeral remains open to the public. The following reports
were from the CNN, BBC (Sept. 2,
2012), and the Human Rights Watch Report titled “Development Without Freedom” (2010) used to compare data
from two competing ideologies in the modern mythmaking in Ethiopia and finally
with my prison notes.
a) CNN, Faith
Karimi
In Ethiopia, the
first state funeral since Empress Zewditu’s in 1930 was held on September 2,
2012 when mourners bid farewell to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, “who hailed him
for bringing development to the nation during his 21-year rule” (CNN, Sept. 2,
20102). Meles
was credited for working toward peace and security in the relatively unstable
region of the Horn of Africa. His government is also “lauded for effective use
of aid money,” but “human rights groups accused his government of a heavy hand
and a series of abuses, including limiting press freedoms and cracking down on
the opposition” (ibid).
b)
BBC Africa News, Elizabeth Blunt
On September 2, 2012, mourners came
to Mr. Melles’ official residence at the Grand National Palace. His flag-draped
coffin was placed high on the stage until it was taken to the city’s Meskel
square for mourners to ceremonially pay tribute. More than 20 African heads of
state attended this ceremony of the state funeral. On the state funeral Boni
Yayi of Benin, current president of the African Unity mourned Mr. Meles saying,
“with his energy, vision and fight for the achievement of a free and prosperous
Africa, the late Meles Zenawi was a force on which the African Union depended
in this last 10 years.” Jacob Zuma of South Africa hailed, Mr. Meles’s
reputation beyond the continent: “We are proud of Meles Zenawi and the
leadership he provided on issues affecting the continent and around the globe.”
c) Human Rights Watch Report, Oct.
2010
In its 101page long report the
Human Rights Watch put Ethiopia as a country with a total population of 85
million half of which live below poverty line and 10 to 20 percent rely on food
aid every year (p4). The country is also one of the world’s largest recipients
of foreign development aid, and external assistance second after Indonesia,
amounting US$3 billion in funds annually, from external donors such as the
World Bank, the United States, the European Commission, the United Kingdom,
Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, and Japan. According to HR report, foreign
donors “insist that their support underwrites much-needed agricultural growth,
food security, and other putatively non-political programs”. However, contrary
to the HRW research findings: “the development aid flows through, and directly
supports, a virtual one-party state with a deplorable human rights record
(ibid). The human rights violations include, jailing, silencing critics and
media, enacting laws to undermine human rights activity, and hobbling the
political opposition (HRW, 2010:4).
Next,
to further deconstruct the fallacious “Great Man” theory and mythmaking by
Meles’s supporters, I present my testimony as ex-prisoner of conscience by
Meles’s regime before I turn to the discussion and conclusion of my argument.
Inside Maekelawi: An Auto-ethnographic Account
In what follows I give my personal account as a victim of Meles’s
regime and the story is revealing.
Beyond the idealized notion of what ethnography should be, the present
account is an irregular ethnography in light of the different contexts in which
ethnography is used. My personal testimony of the Maekelawi Central Prison as a
victim of Meles’s authoritarian regime makes my methodological shift toward
autoethnography quite reasonable, or at least tolerable. An ethnographic
incursion into prison by itself is not only irregular but also saddening.
Following the 2005 violent election fraud, I was detained in Lideta
prison, Addis Ababa, after I had been fired for one year from my teaching
position in Jimma Teachers’ College in 2004. When I was arrested in October
2008 in Addis Ababa, I was taken to Maekelawi halted by security forces on my
way to Addis Ababa University, Main Campus, where I was teaching. I was
detained allegedly for inciting violence through my poems and books until I was
released by intercessions from Amnesty International and other humanitarian
organizations. I was closed inside a horrifying 4x4 meter room of massive walls
day and night with twenty (or more) other Oromo prisoners of conscience horded
into one room. We were held in
communicado in detention in Maekelawi where we were tortured and ill-treated by
Meles’s security and police forces who used severe torturous and malicious acts
to investigate and elicit information. Meles’s Government and the National
Anti-Terrorism Taskforce claimed we, the detained civilians (businessmen and
women, university students, lecturers), had links to the armed opposition
front, the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF). Some of
us were briefly brought before a primary court, allegedly accused of organizing
or inciting violence and some reportedly for financially supporting the OLF.
The Amnesty International wrote in its Letter of Appeal (AI, November 2008) to
Meles Zenawi mentioning 15 of us that we and other Oromo detainees were at risk
of torture and ill-treatment.
There were 12 other cells, 6 on each side of an open courtyard of about two meters wide, eight toilets and two showers for more than 100 prisoners at a time. There were also solitary confinements in which, presumably, all prisoners were Oromo who suffered a common destiny. In other cells there were several Oromo prisoners detained for years without charge and fair trial. There were prisoners who were detained after released by the court (such a double standard!), after their case was invalidated as false allegations and files were closed. In the prison younger prisoners were beaten more severely almost every night and denied medical treatment. The tortures included being blindfolded and hung by the wrists for several hours, bound by chains to a pole and beaten, held in solitary confinement for months and subjected to mental torture, and forced to stand for over ten hours or so with heavy objects hanging from one’s genitalia. There were prisoners who were tortured beyond any measure and killed in other detaining centers such as the notorious Qallitti prison.
Inside the prison, as prisoners of conscience would, we filled the
muted spaces with lived lives: we sang songs of hope and fear, told stories of
pain and laughter, success and failure day in day out behind the bar. In every
one of us there were unheard voices, unlit fires. We knew that our enemy knew
that our power of knowledge was the
product of our knowledge of power. By
dismantling the moral will of our elites, we knew that, our enemies’ plan
was/is to incapacitate our knowledge of
power by pulling us apart, weakening us as a nation, and ripping our unity
to pieces. Being in prison is ritual. Being in prison is a new way of being a
new sapling, a real self. Being in prison is a transformative moment of new
self-awakening in a subliminal space. Freedom is not free!
Discussions and Conclusion
Metaphorically
speaking, in the songs of lament by the Salale horsemen (texts 1-5), the deceased
and the mourner became equal in that at present the two occupied the same
place, the place, Finfinnee, which
the Oromo lost to Emperor Minilek, now the liminal place in between here and
there, that both were bounded to abandon sooner or later: one to death, another
to life. For the deceased, the issue of boundedness
is in being human, to be limited by cosmos and not to know the limit originates
out of insatiable human greed for power and wealth, fame and recognition. For
the mourner, boundedness is not more
serious than the sun hurrying toward west to set! The mourner is an artist, and
if an artist is what would have to be in Plato’s conception of art, so an
artist is imitator. That is, to Plato
an artist is not the inventor of new form but the imposer of pre-existing form
as yet formless material. This is true if the national mourning project (State Funeral) is to enact the
dissolution of mythologizing ideology through memorializing the deceased as in
the lament “nagaatti kaa, nagaatti / simbiri
wacuu jammarteetti,” that is, “be
well, rest in peace / it’s dawning on
us,” when hope for the mourner is but in the future.
From the data presented under (c), one can see
that the late Meles Zenawi was nothing but a dictator. His austerity,
hardworking and diligent self-discipline as a Great Man (a, b) was expounded
and his reputation acclaimed beyond the national and regional boundaries amid
the increasing repression in Ethiopia was part of the process of mythologizing ideology in the region. According
to Elizabeth Blunt, the former BBC correspondent in Addis Ababa, the land grab policy
of the government is causing serious harms (Jaatee 2012) and its economy is
dominated by state- or party-owned companies. She has also observed that the every-day
life and activities of the people are tightly controlled by local officials,
who recruit peasants to local posts to oversee and report. It is important to
add that the ongoing war with a long rebellion in the Somali-speaking region
and the 25, 000 or more Oromo prisoners of conscience were/are no less a
serious agenda for the continent, to which I turn soon in this section.
The
established aggressive taking of land, human rights violations and displacement
of the Oromo on every corner of 30 to 40 miles around the capital Addis Ababa
is another grave issue in Ethiopia when Meles’ reputation is flagged as a Great
Man. The mythologizing of the dictator as a Great Man of the nation is not
without eulogizing the brutal crackdown of oppositional political parties under
the cover of the anti-terrorism legislation newly adopted. Meles’ personal
dominance in the empire’s political arena also caused suspicion to the
Brussels-based think-tank, the Crisis Group, who warned that the deputy PM will
lead weaker government that will face mounting grievances along ethnic and
religious lines. Observers and political analysts also feared about political
transition in Ethiopia. Yet, the empire seems calm and stable in his absence,
and peaceful transition of power was made possible, and the mythmaking story is
spinning.
Towards
the Great Man myth, the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice acclaimed Meles’
vision and foresight, wit and intelligence saying, “He wasn’t just brilliant,
he wasn’t just relentless negotiator and a formidable debater, he wasn’t just a
thirsty consumer of knowledge—he was uncommonly wise, able to see the big
picture and the long game…” It is true that Meles was a welcome ally in the US
war against terrorism and some would consider him as a “preferred face” of the
new Africa. The thematic thread that runs through all those eulogizing
narratives is the same, and the life of
the people is also said to have changed at the grassroots level, especially in
the agricultural sector, so much as skyscrapers are rising above the capital.
By the Human Rights Watch report (2010), however, half of the total population
of the empire lived under poverty line and 10 to 20 percent relied on food aid
every year (p4).
Contrary
to the myth-making and to confirm the politicization of donor-supported
government services, the HRW team interviewed in October 2009 the former
minister of defense, Siye Abraha, whom Meles imprisoned for six years, and also
a senior western aid official in Ethiopia. Siye said, the rural administration,
land, fertilizer, rural credit companies that provide loans to buy inputs for
the peasants’ livelihoods are all controlled by the government. And the western
aid official also attested “Every tool at their disposal—fertilizer, loans,
safety net—is being used to crush the opposition. We know this.” (HRW,
2010:34). From those testimonies, it is evident that the wreaking Ethiopian
peasant’s economy feeds into the folkloric poverty of the empire worsened under
Mele’s dictatorial regime, which is responsible for triggering recurrent famine
and social devastations.
From what we know, it is a common knowledge that Ethiopia has
been at civil war for long, and also I believe, the ongoing war in Ethiopia is
not the war on terror, for it has never been so, but the war of terror targeted
against the Oromo to incapacitate us as people, tie us up in bondage, in abject
poverty and underdevelopment in the region. The reconsideration of the
Salale dirges, reports, and my own personal narrative accounts of the prison presented
in this article have been to historicize the predicaments the Oromo suffer(ed)
under Meles Zenawi’s regime. It is also to reexamine the ways in which self and
social forms are reconstituted through performances under such a disempowering
situation. Beyond the mythmaking, while still our fate is in our hand, but the
question is not simply “Great Man” or “Great Myth”? “Historic” or
“Mythic”? The question is rather, in Ethiopia, Does Humanity have a Future?
Let me make the following general remarks before I hasten to
conclude. It has been my purpose to argue that myth and mythmaking as political
artifact is embedded in, productive of, and in turn produced by power/knowledge
relations. In
this study I have not sought to expand definitions of myth or mythmaking to
include narrative or discursive forms,
cultural practices, or historical events constituted publically as coherent and continuous, or as
foundational for assertions of identity or identification, individual or
collective, but covertly used for coercive measures. I have tried to show
instead how historical and contemporary forms of mythmaking serve, in
nationalistic discourse or mythologizing ideology, both as a mirror of
prevailing social and personal identities or as powerful coercive template for
their dissolution. Failure to recognize discursive and dialogic qualities of
mythmaking and myths and thus tendency to ignore, fail to discern, or elide to
consider the productive function of myth in a variety of power/knowledge
matrices originate from the lack of value-laden definitions of history as fact
and myth as ideology in narrative to the point that we mistake a man-eater
political orangutan for a great man.
Endnotes
1. “Negativism” is used here not as a
binary opposition to “conformity” but to point at a slippery slope between
“ideology” and being an “ideologue”. Ideology is necessary to systematically
deal with a set of issues, frame life, and give guidelines for application to
life in a consistent manner. Thus “negativism” is rebelliousness against lack
of a defined ideology as a people having firm social cohesion and just cause (kaawoo). Mythology is a reference point
to provide models for life and wisdoms about how to live a just, virtuous and
successful life. The stories told sand the songs sung encapsulate the pure
wisdom of the past generation. To manipulate those pure wisdoms for an unjust
cause in such a malevolent manner for a wicked act is against the will toward
common vision and the ideology is therefore “negativistic”.
2. Ideology is believed to be more
important in uncertain situations than where there is certainty. In situations
when there is certainty, the link between policy and outcomes are certain and,
hence, ideology is less a determinant factor. Under such current situation of
Ethiopia is caught in the need to concoct ideology becomes more prevalent and
rational actions become more difficult. To achieve social and political
persuasion ideological appeals to emotions and feelings become effective mean
through mystifying the reality (mythologizing ideology) and “inventing
traditions”.
3. The French Social anthropologist
Georges Dumezil has since 1940 produced a series of books and articles arguing
that Indo-European societies maintained a tripartite division societal
functions reflected in social organization, ideology and mythology. In social
stratification, the three functions were realized through three strata of
priests, kings and judge; warriors, and peasants. Priests, kings, and judge mediate
between their people and supernatural power and also rule, and mete out justice;
whereas, warriors (heroes/heroines) protect society against foreign aggression
and rebellion and peasants work and produce to provide goods and services and
to support the performances of the two superior functions. What is more
relevant here is that, on a closer scrutiny, the symbolism of the king’s
(ruler’s) body has such a wider implication and cannot be confined to the
ideological scheme of the tripartite theory. In Ethiopia’s mythologized
ideology, Meles was more than a demi-god, and by analogy, a Divine power
representing the Trinity: in most cases he was superior to or outside of the
tripartite structure (Dumezil’s three strata and functions), and at the same
time he was the most eminent representative of the first function and yet in
other cases represented a mixture of all three functions (Cf. Henry Claessen
and Jarich Oosten’s (1996) Ideology and
the Formation of Early States).
Acronyms
OLF Oromo
Liberation Front
EPRDF Ethiopian
Peoples’ Revolutionary
Democratic Front
Democratic Front
HRW Human
Rights Watch
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Published in the Journal of Oromo Studies, Vol. 20, 2013.
Published in the Journal of Oromo Studies, Vol. 20, 2013.
