When the Cell Doors Opened

Ethiopia’s dream of freedom, and the machine folded inside the gift

By E. Frashie  ·  The Ethiopian Tribune

In the spring of 2018 the cell doors opened, and for a season it was possible to believe that Ethiopia had walked out of its own history. They came out blinking into the light — the journalists, the bloggers, the opposition figures who had been named terrorists for the crime of dissent. Exiles booked their flights home. Armed movements long declared beyond the pale — the Oromo Liberation Front, Ginbot 7, the Ogaden National Liberation Front — were struck from the terror list and invited back into the political fold. A new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, spoke a language the country had not heard from its rulers in living memory: apology, reconciliation, the deliberate un-clenching of the state’s fist. By July he had reached across the trenches of one of Africa’s longest cold wars and made peace with Eritrea, and men who had assumed they would die without hearing an Asmara voice again wept into telephone lines that had been dead for twenty years.

To grasp what follows in this series, one must first take that year seriously on its own terms, without the condescension of hindsight. The joy was not manufactured and the hope was not naïve. For a few extraordinary months a nation of a hundred million people allowed itself the dangerous luxury of belief — belief that the machinery of fear that had governed them since the Derg, and arguably long before, could be switched off by an act of will from the top. They were not wrong to feel it, because the liberation was, in that moment, entirely real. The prisoners really did walk free. The press really did breathe. This is the first and most important thing to understand about a trap: it does not begin with a lie. It begins with a genuine gift.

It is worth pausing on the sheer velocity of that hope, because velocity is part of how a trap works. Within months a word had attached itself to the mood — a giddy, half-ironic “Abiymania” — and the diaspora, which had spent decades organising against the state from the cafés of Washington and the suburbs of Frankfurt, began booking one-way tickets home. Men and women who had assumed they would grow old in exile stood in the arrivals hall at Bole and wept. A whole generation that had known only the closed fist of the security state allowed itself to imagine that the future had, without warning, come early. It felt less like a change of government than a change of era — and it is precisely at such moments, when a people is most open, most trusting, most willing to be remade, that the deepest assumptions about who they are and how they must be governed slip in unexamined.

This series takes its frame from the British documentary-maker Adam Curtis, and in particular from his 2007 BBC film “The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom.” Curtis has spent four decades advancing a single unsettling argument: that those who govern modern societies rule less through open force than through stories about human nature — simplified, often bleak models of what a person fundamentally is — and that these models, though partial and born in strange places, escape the seminar rooms in which they are made, remake the world in their image, and finally close around us like a trap. In earlier films — “The Century of the Self” (2002), on how Freud’s ideas were turned into the machinery of consumer persuasion, and “The Power of Nightmares” (2004), on the mirrored fantasies of neoconservatives and Islamists — he rehearsed the method. “The Trap,” in three parts, is his most sustained attempt to explain how a sincere ideal of freedom curdled, across the late twentieth century, into a new and subtler system of control.

It is a film worth watching from Addis Ababa in 2026, because we have lived its argument at compressed speed. Curtis builds his case on a distinction drawn by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, to which this series will return in detail: the distinction between freedom from interference and freedom to become one’s truer self. His bleak suggestion is that both, once run through the machinery of the modern state, become cages — the first a marketised loneliness, the second a licence for coercion. Before we can test so grand a claim against our own condition, we must sit inside the Ethiopian spring of 2018 and ask a question almost no one asked at the time. Not whether the freedom was real — it was — but what model of ourselves, what picture of who Ethiopians are and how they behave, was quietly folded inside the gift.

Because here is the thing about that spring that we did not see, for who looks a gift of freedom in the mouth. Every door that swung open was also a mechanism. The same amnesty that let exiled fighters come home let older grievances come home too, and remember themselves, and look about for redress. The same opening that unbanned the parties and freed the press invited every people in the federation to calculate — at last out loud, and without penalty — exactly what it stood to gain and what it stood to lose in the new dispensation. Freedom of speech became, among much that was noble, also the freedom to inflame. The lifting of the state’s hand from the scales did not produce a weightless equilibrium. It produced a scramble.

The consequences arrived faster than the celebrations could fade. Along the frontier between the Southern Nations and Oromia, in Gedeo and West Guji, communities that had lived intermingled for generations turned on one another, and hundreds of thousands fled. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, Ethiopia recorded over the course of 2018 one of the highest figures for new conflict-related internal displacement of any country in the world that year — a grim distinction for a nation whose leader would, the following year, be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No one in the new government had ordered this. That is precisely the point. It followed. It was the logic of the thing, working itself out.

What logic? That is the subject of everything that follows, and it is worth stating the shape of the argument at the outset so the reader can hold the whole in view. Ethiopia in 2018 did not step out of a trap. It stepped into one that had been laid, with the best of intentions, a generation earlier — and the opening of the doors was not the escape but the release of the mechanism. Over the coming parts we will trace three jaws of that mechanism. First, a constitution that models each of the country’s peoples as a suspicious, calculating actor, and quietly rewards distrust — the subject of Part II. Second, a mode of government that trusts its own numbers over the lived reality of its citizens, compressing the person into a data point — Part III. And third, a dream of national prosperity so beautiful and so total that it licenses the bulldozer and calls the demolition freedom — Part IV. In the fifth and final part we will ask whether there is any way out at all.

There is a temptation in an argument like this one that must be named and resisted from the very first page, and it is a temptation to which Curtis himself sometimes succumbs. It is the temptation of the total explanation — the single hidden machine that accounts for everything, that turns every death into a data point in a theory and every actor into a puppet of a structure. That way lies both bad history and bad faith. The men and women who govern Ethiopia are not the helpless marionettes of a Cold War equation, and to present them so would be to hand them the greatest gift a powerful person can receive: the alibi that nothing was ever a choice. This series uses the trap as a lens, not as a theology. The structure explains why certain choices were tempting, why trust was structurally fragile, why the open doors let in what they let in. It does not dissolve the responsibility of those who chose.

The illusion was not that the freedom was real. It was real. The illusion was that freedom, once handed down from above, would keep itself.

So let us begin where the dream began, and remember it honestly. The prisoners walked free. The phones to Asmara rang after twenty years of silence. A leader stood before his people and spoke of love — መደመር, medemer, coming together — and meant it, and the people believed him, and for a moment the belief was its own kind of truth. That is not the illusion this series will puncture. The illusion was subtler and sadder: it was the belief that a nation could receive its liberty as a finished gift and not have to build it, painfully and against the grain of its own machinery, from below. A Curtis film would freeze the frame here — not on a villain’s face, but on a door swinging open, and something stepping through it that no one had invited and no one could now call back. We opened the door in the spring of 2018. In the next part we turn to the room it opened onto — and to the founding document that had been waiting, patiently, on the other side.

Sources

The film. Adam Curtis, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (BBC, 2007), in three parts. Also The Century of the Self (BBC, 2002) and The Power of Nightmares (BBC, 2004).

The theory named. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), for the distinction between negative and positive liberty developed across this series.

The Ethiopian record. The reforms of 2018 (prisoner releases, de-listing of the OLF, Ginbot 7 and ONLF, the July 2018 rapprochement with Eritrea) and the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize are matters of public record. Displacement figures for 2018 as monitored by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), Global Report on Internal Displacement; to be cited to the specific IDMC figure at production.

THE TRAP · PART I OF V · THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE