Monday, December 31, 2012

“GREAT MAN” OR “GREAT MYTH?”


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
HRW                    Human Rights Watch  
 
References
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Jeon, Jei Guk. (Winter 2000). “The Politics of Mourning Ritual in North Korea, (1994–97)” in World Affairs, Vol. 162, No. 3, pp. 126-136.

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Published in the Journal of Oromo Studies, Vol. 20, 2013. 

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