Editorial Foreword

The Spear We Helped to Forge

A foreword to Professor Girma Berhanu’s essay on South Africa’s anti-immigrant violence and the shared history that makes it unbearable to watch.

There are betrayals that wound precisely because of what came before them. When a stranger turns on you, the injury is simple. When someone you once armed and sheltered does, the injury carries the whole weight of the history you shared. It is this second, heavier grief that runs beneath Professor Girma Berhanu’s latest essay for this newspaper, and it is why we commend it to our readers with particular care.

The Professor of the University of Gothenburg, and a contributor whose scholarship has enriched these pages across many months, on subjects ranging from the Amhara question to the health of Ethiopian democracy turns here to the mob violence that has once more engulfed African migrants in South Africa. Ethiopians have been among the dead. He asks us to hold two facts in the same hand: that our compatriots are being burned, beaten and driven from their livelihoods; and that it was Ethiopia, six decades ago, that helped teach the men of Umkhonto we Sizwe how to fight.

That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a matter of record one this newspaper has itself reported at first hand, through the testimony of an Ethiopian officer who trained fighters of the Spear of the Nation for the armed struggle. When Professor Berhanu describes the young Nelson Mandela receiving military instruction on Ethiopian soil in 1962, he is naming a debt that South Africa’s own liberation history acknowledges. The essay’s force lies in the distance between that debt and the present cruelty.

Readers will know that the Tribune has devoted sustained coverage to this crisis from “Pass Freely and Without Hindrance” to “The Deadline and the Debt” and our analysis of the countermeasures now open to African states. Professor Berhanu widens the frame from policy to conscience. He is not content to catalogue the violence; he asks what African solidarity was ever for, if it dissolves the moment the shooting stops and the invoices arrive.

We are grateful, as ever, for his continued generosity to our readership, and proud to carry his voice. A synopsis follows; the essay may be read in full via the link below.

— The Editors, The Ethiopian Tribune

Synopsis

Professor Berhanu builds his essay in three movements.

He opens on the violence itself: the recurring waves of mob attacks on foreign African nationals, justified in the language of stolen jobs and illegal residence, and the human wreckage they leave behind the dead, the looted shops, the displaced families. He notes that some governments, Nigeria among them, have moved to evacuate their citizens and even to document their losses for future compensation, while Ethiopia, he argues, has too often stood by. From this he draws the essay’s two organising questions: what concrete measures could end the violence, and how might African states and institutions be mobilised to hold South Africa to account?

The central section is a work of historical retrieval. Here he sets out Ethiopia’s contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle: the military training of the ANC’s armed wing, including Mandela’s own instruction in 1962; the diplomatic and political campaigning against the apartheid regime; the seat of the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa; the moral leadership of Emperor Haile Selassie; and the deeper symbolism of Adwa in 1896 and of an Ethiopia that never fell. Solidarity, he reminds us, was not a slogan but a policy paid for in scarce resources and, elsewhere on the continent, in lives.

He then turns to the anatomy of the violence in present-day South Africa: the structural drivers of unemployment, inequality and poverty; the scapegoating of migrants against the weight of the evidence; and government responses he judges long on condemnation and enforcement yet short on prevention. Most pointedly, he sets out the paradox that animates the piece that a wealthy minority, insulated by private security and now courted for expedited asylum abroad, escapes the street-level fury that instead falls upon the poorest and least protected. Civil society, he argues, must carry much of the work that policing alone cannot.

The essay closes where it began with Ethiopia, and with a charge against the Ethiopian state, whose apparent indifference to its citizens abroad Professor Berhanu names as a second tragedy laid atop the first. The victims, he insists, deserve justice; their families deserve compassion; and Africa deserves better than a future in which those who once stood together against oppression are divided by fear.