The drama of ethnic identity (By Asfa-Wossen Asserate)

After they became independent, tribalism took hold. Why African states are not making progress – and what needs to be done.

By Prince Asfa-Wossen Asserate

In 1963, the Organisation of African Unity, a predecessor of today’s African Union, was founded in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Abeba. I was fifteen years old and a pupil at the local German school. The boys played a kind of game there. They approached a classmate and asked him:

‘Where are you from? What’s your home country?’ When I was asked the same question, I replied with some astonishment: ‘What’s this question about? I am Ethiopian.’ ‘No, that was yesterday. As of today, you’re African,’ said a fellow pupil.

This little anecdote is a reminder of how great the euphoria was back then, not just among us students in Addis Abeba, but throughout Africa.

The early sixties were the period in which most African countries gained their independence. There were great hopes: Unity of the continent, a Pan-African future, peace, independence, economic prosperity. Millions of people all over the African continent longed for an upswing and a better life.

Soon, however, there were armed conflicts in the newly formed nations. The triggers were ethnic conflicts between different ethnic groups in some of the 55 countries. When the major European powers divided Africa among themselves, in the nineteenth century, they drew the borders of their colonies on the drawing board. They took no account to the history of the respective region or ethnic identities. On the contrary: according to the motto ‘divide and rule’, the colonial rulers played the various ethnic groups against each other. They divided large former nations into different tribal territories and fueled the differences between the respective ethnic groups, to make them compliant.

Some ethnic groups acquired the favor of the Europeans. They collaborated at the expense of other tribes. Even in centuries before, the hunt for slaves was a lucrative business for some ethnic groups.

Their clients were the slave traders who between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century around thirteen million Africans deported overseas. Hatred, envy and mistrust between the peoples of Africa were fostered over generations. The division of African societies into ethnic groups is the main reason why Europeans were able to conquer the entire continent in less than fifty years.

‘Tribalism is the curse of Africa’, said the first Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda.

Like the other founding fathers of the Organization of African Unity, he wanted to achieve the existing colonial borders, he wanted to promote a new sense of togetherness between the ethnic groups. The hope was to overcome tribalism within the new nations and ultimately to find a pan-African identity, according to the motto ‘unity in diversity and diversity in unity’.

But tribalism – discrimination based on ethnic origin – soon found its way back into the new African societies. The former colonial powers continued to secure influence and access to raw materials, by supporting local elites. Where the national movement had a charismatic leader, a cult of personality often developed. Initial multi-party systems often turned into one-party rule, which supported the autocrat. The most important power factor was usually the military, which relied on a European-trained officer corps and in many cases was dominated by just one ethnic group.

Even the best positions in politics and business were by those in power to people of their own ethnic group, just like offices for judges and public prosecutors. It was not about the good of the nation. It was about bringing one’s own ethnic group the fleshpots. That is the fertilizer on which corruption thrives and that feeds the hatred of the marginalized. New ethnic conflicts soon followed, from the Biafra war at the end of the sixties to the genocide in Rwanda in the mid-nineties. Today, my home country of Ethiopia is at the center of ethnic conflicts. Ethiopia is the only country on the African continent that was never a European colony. Two generations after the founding the Organisation of African Unity it is unfortunately the case that a student in Addis Abeba can no longer say ‘I am an Ethiopian’ without fear. He is expected to answer: ‘I am Oromo.’ Or ‘Amhara’ or ‘Tigrey’ or “Gurage” or “Afar” or ‘Somali’ or any other of the more than eighty ethnic groups that call Ethiopia their home. The common and unifying aspects are no longer emphasized, but the divisive and discriminatory ones. Ethiopia describes itself in its 1995 constitution as an ‘ethnic federation’.

Only by belonging to one of the ethnic groups of the country one becomes an Ethiopian citizen. This is unique. Many countries have even far greater ethnic differentiation than Ethiopia, such as Nigeria or India. In all democratic constitutions around the world, the entire people are the common sovereign. Not in Ethiopia: Here we are only talking about the sovereignty of the different peoples and ethnic groups.

‘When the awareness of the unity of humanity dwindled, clans and peoples and strife without end’, wrote the Chinese sage Lao-Tse more than 2500 years ago. Ethiopia is a country whose culture is founded on the Bible. It is the original home of all Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. What the Chinese sage called the ‘consciousness of unity of mankind’, the apostle Paul expresses in christian language: ‘There are no longer Jews and Greek, not slave and free, male and female; for you are all one are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal. 3,28). For me, this is the basis for a multi-ethnic society, as it has been in Ethiopia for centuries, living together peacefully. But what does ‘ethnic federation’ mean?

The burish nationalist politician Daniel François Malan became Prime Minister of South Africa in 1948 and installed the notorious system of racial segregation, the apartheid regime. ‘Apartheid’ means “separateness”. Malan himself defined this regime as an ‘ethnic federation’. We can see similarly devastating consequences of political segregation by ethnicity in Ethiopia today: division and hatred that escalate into civil wars, in brutal and bloody massacres against other ethnic groups, including mothers and children. Inhuman incitement, today especially against the amhara ethnic group, both by ethiopian politicians and in the social media, erodes the threshold of aggression. People who have lived together as neigbours for generations, are now being compared to a ‘virus’ that needs to be eradicated, with animals that need to be slaughtered, or to weeds that should be uprooted. And in Ethiopia it has not stopped at threats and incitement: We mourn the loss of tens of thousands of victims of so-called ‘ethnic cleansing’. There is no end to the killings. Today, the Oromo are the largest ethnic group in the country. They also include Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. The second largest ethnic group, the Amhara, are confronted with the historically false accusation of having dominated and subjugated the other peoples in Ethiopia’s long history. The three-thousand-year history of the empire is said to have been an Amhara history – which does not correspond to the facts.

Whatever one may accuse the Ethiopian imperial dynasty of, its goal was never the dominance of one ethnic group, but the unity and independence of the nation. That is why the ruling dynasty’s marriage policy was designed to unite the peoples. In the long history of the Solomonic dynasty, there was never a ruler who belonged to only one particular ethnic group. The old name of Ethiopia is Abyssinia. It is derived from the Arabic word ‘habesch’, meaning mixed race.

Because that is what Ethiopia has always been and still is today: a melting pot of different peoples and ethnicities. Today, however, Ethiopian identity cards assign each citizen to a specific ethnic group, usually that of their father. This entry can make the difference between life and death in the event of conflict. The Ethiopian government shows little interest in uniting the country or calming the conflicts. On the contrary, it pours oil on the fire of anger and hatred between the ethnic groups.

The world public, however, mostly looks away. Prime Minister Abiy started 2018 with rich advance praise for his office. I also had high hopes for him. He promised peace, unification of the country, economic upturn and the end of the ‘apartheid constitution’. For the end of the decades-long conflict with neighbouring country Eritrea, he was awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize. It was not least the excessive international enthusiasm at the beginning of his time in government that encouraged the prime minister in his uncompromising course. Today, Abiy plays one ethnic group off against the other to maintain his power. He seems to have lost touch with reality. Abiy sees himself as the founder of a new cushitic Oromo empire. He is currently having a new palace built, a kind of luxury playground totaling five hundred hectares, ‘bigger than Windsor, the White House, the Kremlin and the Forbidden City put together’, as the magazine ‘Africa Confidential’ has noted. It is to be an urban amusement park for the elite, on a hill above the capital, with a luxury hotel, conference center and luxury residential complexes.

A cable car is to transport residents and guests back and forth. The construction costs are estimated at ten billion dollars is the estimated construction cost. This corresponds to almost the entire annual national budget of Ethiopia. Yet more than twenty million people, one sixth of the population, are currently dependent on food rations again. The tender plant of the economic upswing has long since withered. The Ethiopian national currency, the birr, has just been devalued by thirty per cent. The supply situation for the population continues to worsen. War and poor harvests have been followed by famine and hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing from rampant violence. In addition to ethnocentric politics, poor governance and corrupt elites are the main reasons for persistent hardship and misery in many African countries. The many billions in development aid that flow into Africa year after year have hardly improved the living conditions of the people on the continent:

A large proportion of this money flows into the pockets of corrupt elites, who use it to finance luxury flats in Paris or London or fill Swiss bank accounts. What is needed is an international control body that monitors the allocation of funds according to strict criteria. The allocation of funds according to strict criteria. The most important criterion should be good governance. With ethnocentric tyrant rulers who trample on human rights in their countries, who do not uphold the rule of law, provoke ethnic conflicts, and are generally only interested in increasing their own wealth there must be no more co-operation. It is in Europe’s own interest to give young people in Africa in particular the prospect of a better life in their home countries. More than half of today’s 1.3 billion Africans are under the age of twenty. Anyone visiting Africa today is impressed by the omnipresence of the smartphone and the social media activities of young Africans. Thanks to digital media, young people there are connected to the globalized world. Their ambitions are orientated accordingly the prosperity of industrialized countries, which has become a global benchmark. This has an impact on all areas of life, especially on consumer behavior and migration. People who have nothing left to lose and see their only prospects in flight cannot be stopped in the long term. Their numbers in Africa are constantly increasing. The main reasons for this are as follows: ethnocentric politics, poor governance, corrupt elites.