The General of the Poor and the Shards of Harar

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One hundred and twenty years on, we mourn a man twice over, first to death, then to the rather more deliberate vandalism of political convenience.

BY THOMAS ARAYA

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

“When the telegrapher delivered the news, he got it wrong;

It is not Makonnen who has died, but the poor.”

ETHIOPIAN VERSE, COMPOSED IN MOURNING, 1906

These lines were not written by a courtier angling for a pension, nor by a priest reciting the obligatory liturgy of grief. They were written because an entire country felt the floor give way beneath its feet. One hundred and twenty years ago today, on Megabit 13, 1898 by the Ethiopian calendar, or the 22nd of March, 1906 to those of us consulting a rather more internationally recognised diary, His Highness Ras Makonnen Wolde Mikael departed this world at the age of fifty-four. He left behind him a city that wept, an emperor who was inconsolable, and a legacy that has since been subjected to indignities that would make a lesser ghost very cross indeed.

But this is not merely an occasion for the sort of anniversary column that pats the subject on the head and moves swiftly on. The year 2026 demands more than archival reverence. It demands we look, with clear and slightly uncomfortable eyes, at what has been done or more precisely, what has been not done to the memory of the man his people called the General of the Poor.

The Final Journey: From the Burqa to the Tomb

History records Ras Makonnen’s last days with a poignancy that no dramatist could improve upon. In early 1902 (1894 by the Ethiopian reckoning), the great Ras fell gravely ill. His physicians in Harar, a city he had governed with the quiet authority of a man who understood both swords and diplomacy recommended the superior medical facilities of the young capital, Addis Ababa. And so, on the 12th of January, he set out.

It proved, as these journeys so often do, to be more pilgrimage than medical mission. By the 17th, his caravan had reached the Burqa River, where he paused to observe the Feast of the Epiphany, Timkat amidst the holy waters. There, with the ceremonies swirling around him and his condition worsening with rather poor timing, the Ras made the decision that only a man who knows himself can make: he turned back. Not to Harar, exactly, but to the hills of Kulubi, and to the Church he had served all his life. It was there, on the 22nd of March, 1906, that he drew his last breath.

The mourning that followed was, by any measure, extraordinary. Emperor Menelik II, his cousin, his comrade, and the man with whom he had stood at Adwa a decade earlier, decreed that the forty-day memorial be observed in the capital. On Monday the 30th of April, the air above Addis Ababa was thick with incense and the chanting of thousands of priests drawn from every monastery and cathedral in the central highlands. The following day, St. George’s Day, a vast encampment of tents rose at Se’i Meda. His ceremonial robes were paraded. His golden crown. The medals he wore with that particular quiet dignity of men who have actually earned their decorations. His horses and mules, draped in gold-leafed trappings, walked riderless through the crowds, a sight, one imagines, that reduced grown soldiers to silence.

“The death of Makonnen was, the poet insisted, truly the death of the poor and one suspects the poor knew it before the telegrapher did.”

The Modern Paradox: A Legacy in Fragments

We arrive now at the present day, and the atmosphere changes considerably. We are in the era of “Medemer” a philosophy championed by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed that presents itself as the great weaving-together of Ethiopia’s disparate historical threads into something coherent and proud. Under this administration, “Great Man” history has enjoyed something of a renaissance. The Adwa Victory Memorial stands in the heart of the capital, gleaming and enormous. Unity Park occupies the meticulously restored Grand Palace. The rhetoric regarding the “restoration of the military institution” to its former glory flows freely and often.

One might observe, with only the gentlest of ironies, that restoring an institution’s image is considerably easier than restoring the actual bronze images of the men who built it.

And yet. There exists, in Harar, in the very city that Ras Makonnen built, governed, and made the most cosmopolitan corner of the empire a vacant pedestal. In June 2020, amidst the violent unrest that followed the appalling assassination of the beloved musician Hachalu Hundessa, a mob toppled and smashed the bronze statue of Ras Makonnen. It was not an accident. It was not collateral damage. It was a targeted act a symbolic execution of a man who had already been dead for one hundred and fourteen years and might therefore have reasonably expected to be left in peace.

The state’s response to this act of cultural desecration? A silence so complete it had its own echo.

The Selective Memory of the State

PM Abiy Ahmed has, on numerous occasions, positioned himself as the custodian of Ethiopian military tradition the heir to the generals who routed the Italians at Adwa. He invokes their names. He commissions their memorials. He speaks of continuity. It is stirring stuff, and would be considerably more stirring were it applied with any consistency.

Ras Makonnen was not merely one of the generals of Adwa. He was arguably its most consequential diplomat and strategist the man who had spent years in European capitals learning precisely how the continent worked, and deploying that knowledge in service of an empire that most Europeans had blithely assumed would simply capitulate. To honour Adwa without honouring Makonnen is rather like celebrating a Test match whilst quietly pretending that one of the opening batsmen didn’t exist.

“To leave Ras Makonnen’s statue in pieces is to hand the mob a permanent veto over national history a rather alarming precedent for any government to set.”

Critics and there are many, though they tend to express themselves carefully suggest that the Prime Minister is performing a delicate, perhaps rather cynical, balancing act. The imagery of the imperial military provides historical legitimacy to the current state. But rebuilding the statue of Ras Makonnen in Harar risks irritating the more nationalist elements of his ethnic Oromo constituency, some of whom have chosen to see Makonnen through the reductive lens of “imperial expansionist” rather than as the vastly more complicated figure he actually was.

And here, here is where the irony becomes almost physically painful. Ras Makonnen was himself of Oromo descent. He hailed from the Wollo Oromo lineage. He spoke multiple languages. He embodied, in his own person, precisely the kind of multi-ethnic, integrated Ethiopian identity that the current administration endlessly claims to champion. The man who is being implicitly erased as a symbol of “imperial oppression” was, in his own right, a son of the very people in whose name the erasure is being conducted.

One is tempted to suggest that whoever is advising the government on the history of its own country might benefit from a library card.

The Cost of Silence

The “selective restoration” we observe across Ethiopia today, where certain statues receive fresh gilding whilst others remain broken in storage or simply absent from their plinths, reveals something uncomfortable about how history is being deployed. It is not being used as a foundation for national identity. It is being used as a political utility: polished when convenient, discarded when inconvenient, and never, under any circumstances, allowed to complicate the preferred narrative of the day.

When the government spends millions on the Adwa Memorial in Addis Ababa whilst “forgetting” the broken bronze in Harar, the message is plain enough: the past is welcome at the table only when it behaves itself. History, in this reading, is not a discipline. It is a decoration.

The mourners of 1906 understood something rather more profound. They understood that Ras Makonnen’s claim on the collective grief of Ethiopia was not bureaucratic or tribal. It transcended ethnicity, rank, and geography. He was a protector of the common person, the one the poet called simply “the poor”, in the fullest and most generous sense of that word.

A continuity with large gaps in it is not, strictly speaking, continuity. It is, at best, a very long ellipsis.

A CALL FOR CONSISTENCY

As we mark this one hundred and twentieth anniversary, the Ethiopian Tribune calls for a rejection of this selective amnesia and calls for it without apology. A military institution is not built on new hardware or sharp uniforms. It is built on the unshakeable honour accorded to the men who came before. To leave Ras Makonnen’s statue in pieces is to hand the mob a permanent veto over national history a rather alarming precedent for any government that claims to represent all Ethiopians to set.

If the Prime Minister genuinely wishes to be seen as a restorer of Ethiopian greatness, he must look beyond the capital’s vanity projects and attend to the wounds in his regional cities. Harar is not a footnote. It is where the empire’s most capable mind governed, built, and is now 120 years after his death dishonoured by a silence that speaks volumes.

The poet, writing in the grief of 1906, was correct: when Makonnen died, the poor lost a father. But if we permit his memory to be quietly partitioned away sacrificed to the expediencies of modern ethnic politics then it is not only the poor who have suffered a loss. It is the soul of the Ethiopian nation itself, which has proved, rather too obligingly, that some of its generals can be erased simply by leaving a pedestal empty long enough for everyone to stop noticing.