Weighing the Emperor

A foreword and synopsis to Professor Girma Berhanu’s defence not of Menelik II, but of the standard by which any nineteenth-century ruler should be judged.

Editorial Foreword

Few names in Ethiopian public life can empty a room or fill it with argument as quickly as that of Menelik II. He is summoned as founder and as conqueror, as the architect of a modern state and as the author of its deepest wounds — frequently in the same breath, and frequently by people who are certain about a record they have never read. It is into this charged terrain that Professor Girma Berhanu steps, not to end the quarrel but to insist that it be conducted honestly.

The essay that follows is, at heart, an argument about standards. Its central move is deceptively simple: before we ask whether Menelik was a good ruler, we must first agree on the measure — and then apply that same measure to his contemporaries. Judged by the yardsticks of twenty-first-century democracy, or through the lens of present-day ethnonational narrative alone, any nineteenth-century sovereign will be found wanting. Judged against the men who actually shared his age — Bismarck, Alexander III, the reformers of Meiji Japan, the Ottomans in retreat — a different figure emerges: a statesman who preserved his country’s sovereignty in the one decade when nearly every other African kingdom lost theirs.

The Tribune publishes this piece not as a verdict but as a discipline.

Professor Girma does not ask readers to look away from the conquest of the south and west, the redistributed land, the imperial administration that displaced local authority, or the grievances that outlived the man. He asks, instead, that these be weighed rather than wielded — set beside the achievements rather than used to erase them, and beside the conduct of other expanding states rather than examined in isolation. Where he is most provocative, he turns the question back on the present: why is one expansion remembered as nation-building and another condemned, and who profits from keeping the memory raw?

Readers will disagree with him. Some will feel he grants the emperor too much grace; others will feel the essay concedes too readily what should be defended. Both responses are welcome, because both accept the terms the author is really arguing for — that our past be studied critically, honestly, and in context, and that history be neither romanticised nor weaponised. On that, if on nothing else, this publication stands with him.

Synopsis

Responding to readers who felt his earlier essay had praised Menelik II too warmly, Professor Girma Berhanu returns not to defend the emperor uncritically but to defend a method. The right question, he argues, is not whether Menelik was hero or monster, but by what standard we judge him — and whether we would apply that same standard to the rulers who shared his era.

Set against the age of Bismarck, Meiji Japan, Tsarist Russia and the Scramble for Africa, Menelik emerges as a consequential statesman: the sovereign who defeated Italy at Adwa, modernised the army, introduced railways, telegraph, banking and ministries, and kept Ethiopia independent when only Liberia did the same across an entire continent. Yet the essay refuses to look past the cost — the conquest of southern and western regions, the unequal incorporation of peoples, the legacies of grievance that shape Ethiopia still.

Its most searching turn is toward the present: why some expansions are remembered as nation-building and others as unhealed wounds, and why Ethiopia remains unable to agree on the meaning of its own history. The answer, Professor Girma suggests, lies less with Menelik than with us.

Read the full article — unparalleled-outstanding-leadership.docx

by Professor Girma Berhanu.