By Professor Girma Berhanu

Editorial Foreword

On Dehumanisation, Imagery, and the Long Shadow of Scientific Racism

The Editors  •  Ethiopian Tribune  •  April 2026

There are moments when an act of casual cruelty illuminates, with terrible clarity, the architecture of a deeper malice. When the sitting president of the United States shares an image depicting a Black former president and his wife as primates, the instinct of many is to reach for the vocabulary of aberration: reckless, impulsive, beyond the pale. The Ethiopian Tribune does not share that comfort. What such an act reveals is not an anomaly but a continuity the latest expression of a visual and rhetorical tradition whose roots run through the slave ships, the colonial exhibitions, and the pseudoscientific lecture halls of the 19th century.

It is in that spirit that we publish this essay by Professor Girma Berhanu, a scholar whose career has been devoted to the intersection of education, identity, and political violence. Writing from Sweden, where a social services department recently deployed imagery of apes in hijabs as a pedagogical tool for marginalised youth, Professor Berhanu asks the question that polite discourse prefers to skirt: not merely that such representations are offensive, but why the ape, and why it retains its power to wound across centuries and continents.

The answer, as Professor Berhanu traces with care and rigour, lies in the particular violence done to Darwin’s theory of evolution by those who required a scientific patina for their politics of hierarchy. Evolution taught that humans and apes share common ancestry; Social Darwinism translated that into a ladder, with some peoples assigned rungs closer to the animal kingdom than others. The insult, in this reading, is not merely abusive, it is a claim about ontological status, about who belongs fully within the category of the human.

For readers of this publication, the stakes are not abstract. Ethiopia and the broader Horn of Africa have endured their own encounters with the racialising gaze of empire, their own experience of being rendered primitive and pre-modern in the visual and textual archives of colonialism. The dehumanising logic that Professor Berhanu analyses is the same logic that framed African sovereignty as inconceivable and African suffering as natural. To understand it is to understand something essential about how power legitimises itself.

Professor Berhanu closes with a challenge that is also an obligation: legal remedy is insufficient. What is required is a transformed pedagogy, one that equips young people, and particularly those most targeted by such imagery, to read the visual world critically. The Ethiopian Tribune endorses that challenge unreservedly. Journalism, at its most purposeful, is itself a form of that literacy: naming the structure behind the slur, refusing to let cruelty pass as comedy.

“The insult carries no scientific weight. Its power lies elsewhere: in centuries of conditioning, in the grammar of empire, in the persistent human will to construct a hierarchy of the human.”

— The Editors, Ethiopian Tribune • April 2026

Synopsis

Pictures, Pejorative Discourse, and the “Ape” Insult

Girma Berhanu  •  9 April 2026

This essay examines the historical and cultural origins of the “ape” insult as applied to racialised groups, tracing a line from the misappropriation of Darwinian evolutionary theory through 19th-century scientific racism to the visual propaganda of the present day. The author’s inquiry is prompted by three concurrent incidents: a social media post by the US president deploying primate imagery against a Black former head of state and his wife; a legal complaint in Sweden over educational material depicting marginalised youth as apes; and the persistent reality of monkey chants directed at Black footballers in European stadiums.

Berhanu situates these incidents within a broader argument about visual culture and power. Drawing on bell hooks, Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, and Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, he argues that the biological falsity of the insult is precisely the point: its force derives not from science but from centuries of cultural conditioning that deliberately confused the shared common ancestry of humans and apes with a racial hierarchy in which some peoples were placed “closer to the animal.”

The essay addresses the Swedish school curriculum’s emphasis on visual literacy, argues that images are neither neutral nor trivial particularly when directed at already marginalised communities and calls for an educational and institutional response that goes beyond legal prohibition. Berhanu’s conclusion is that dismantling the cultural infrastructure of dehumanising representation requires historical awareness, critical visual literacy, and a deepened public commitment to human dignity.

Approx. 1,050 words  •  Academic essay / Op-ed  •  Author: Prof. Girma Berhanu, University of Gothenburg  •  Cleared for publication

Essay

Pictures, Pejorative Discourse, and the “Ape” Insult

Girma Berhanu  •  9 April 2026

A few weeks ago, two boys who are enthusiastic about football asked me a difficult question: why are Black footballers insulted in stadiums with monkey chants, images of apes, or even by fans throwing bananas? Why apes of all animals? At the time, I struggled to respond. I tried to explain, in my own way, the role of history, human hierarchies, the theory of evolution, and scientific racism. Yet I felt inarticulate, as if I had not fully captured the depth and cruelty of the issue.

Since then, I have reflected more deeply. One recent incident involved a social media post by the president of the United States, who shared an image depicting a former president and his wife as apes or monkeys. After pressure from members of his own party, the post was deleted. But what was the intended message? That they look like apes, think like apes, or are somehow less evolved?

Public reaction followed a familiar pattern: initial shock, followed by quick dismissal. Many people brushed it aside as a childish or impulsive act, ignoring the deeper structural, institutional, and historical precedents behind such imagery. Yet we know that presidential communication is rarely accidental; it is often carefully crafted within inner political circles.

Around the same time, I revisited How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley, which examines how authoritarian politics divide societies into “us” and “them.” While I cannot explore his full argument here, his framework helps us understand how dehumanising language and imagery function politically.

A third incident occurred closer to home, Sweden. The newspaper Göteborgs-Posten reported that Lars Arrhenius was pursuing a legal case concerning educational material used by a social services department in north-east Gothenburg. The material, titled Angry Apes, was intended as a pedagogical tool for young people facing social challenges. It included images such as an ape wearing a hijab and other apes in a sweater labelled “Orten” (the neighbourhood).

The material was widely criticised and later withdrawn. A complainant argued that it “clearly contains racist and discriminatory images” and risks creating an exclusionary environment for children and youth. It is difficult to understand how associating already marginalised young people with apes could be considered educational. My purpose here is not to enter the legal debate, but to examine the cultural message embedded in such representations. Where does this deeply pejorative association between certain groups and apes originate?

We live in a visual culture. Images shape how we perceive the world, others, and ourselves. Yet many people lack the tools to critically interpret visual representations. As bell hooks observed, it is troubling that mass media increasingly uses powerful imagery for specific effects, whilst simultaneously encouraging us to believe that these images are insignificant.

Even the Swedish curriculum (Lgr 2011) emphasises that images play a crucial role in how people think, learn, and understand the world. Visual literacy is essential for democratic participation. Whilst powerful images can serve as effective pedagogical tools, degrading representations — particularly those targeting marginalised groups such as ethnic minorities, women, disabled individuals, and LGBTQ+ communities — can reinforce harmful stereotypes and produce lasting damage.

To understand the enduring power of the “ape” insult, we must turn to history. Many of us learned about racism and colonialism in school, often alongside the ideas of Charles Darwin. Although Darwin’s work in On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man revolutionised biology, his ideas were widely misunderstood and misused.

Evolution does not claim that humans descended from modern apes. Rather, it posits that humans and apes share a common ancestor. However, this nuance was lost in public discourse. The simplified claim that “humans came from apes” made it easier to weaponise the comparison. Calling someone an “ape” came to imply that they are primitive, less intelligent, or less civilised.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, these distortions merged with scientific racism and Social Darwinism. Thinkers misused evolutionary ideas to construct racial hierarchies, falsely claiming that some groups were “closer to apes” than others. As The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould demonstrates, such pseudoscientific claims were used to justify colonialism, slavery, segregation, and the dehumanisation of non-European peoples.

This history helps explain why the “ape” insult persists today. Biologically, humans are primates; the insult has no scientific basis. Its power lies instead in centuries of cultural conditioning, visual propaganda, and racial hierarchy. The question, then, is not only why the insult exists, but how we confront it. How can we protect new generations — especially Black, Indigenous, and other racialised communities — from such deeply dehumanising representations? What role should schools play? What responsibilities do media and political institutions carry?

Legal measures alone are not enough. What is required is a broader transformative agenda: one that promotes historical awareness, critical visual literacy, and a deeper understanding of human dignity. Only then can we begin to dismantle the cultural foundations that allow such insults to persist.

Girma Berhanu is Professor of Special Education at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

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How Ponzi schemes have evolved from Wall Street to Addis Ababa and why Ethiopia is their latest frontier.

By E Frashie Ethiopian Tribune columnist

It always begins with a promise. The details vary electric vehicles in Addis Ababa, cryptocurrency tokens in Dubai, certificates of deposit in the Caribbean but the underlying architecture is identical. You give someone your money. They give it, quietly, to the person before you. They pay you from someone else’s deposit. And for a while, sometimes a long while, everyone appears to be getting rich.

This is the Ponzi scheme: the most durable financial fraud in human history, named after Charles Ponzi, a Boston-based Italian immigrant who in 1920 raised $15 million in eight months by promising 50 per cent returns in 45 days. The promise was impossible. The returns were paid entirely from incoming investors’ capital. When the flow of new money slowed, the structure collapsed overnight, ruining thousands. Ponzi went to prison. His name entered the dictionary.

More than a century later, the fraud he popularised, though did not invent, continues to devastate ordinary people on every continent. Its latest Ethiopian incarnation, the case of Fintech Investment PLC and its chief executive Daniel Yohannes, who now faces 19 counts before the Federal High Court’s Lideta Branch, is in many respects a textbook example. The vehicle, the promise, and the medium have been modernised. The logic has not changed at all.

WHAT A PONZI SCHEME ACTUALLY IS

The mechanics deserve plain statement, because they are simpler than the marketing around them. A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud in which existing investors are paid using funds collected from new investors, rather than from genuine business profit or productive activity. There are no trades, no returns, no underlying assets generating value. There is only the movement of money from later investors to earlier ones, with the operator extracting a portion at each stage.

Four structural elements are required for the scheme to function. First, a credible promise: returns attractive enough to recruit but not so fantastic as to immediately trigger suspicion. Second, early payouts: a critical phase in which the first cohort genuinely receives money, generating word-of-mouth and social proof. Third, a legitimacy facade: branding, documentation, offices, media presence, and endorsements that simulate the appearance of a functioning enterprise. Fourth, a recruitment engine: the scheme must continuously attract new capital to service existing obligations, whether through social networks, community groups, professional associations, or digital platforms.

The outcome is always the same. When recruitment slows, through market saturation, regulatory pressure, or loss of confidence incoming funds can no longer cover outgoing obligations. The operator withdraws what capital remains. The most recent investors lose everything. This conclusion is not a risk; it is a mathematical certainty. The only variable is timing.

“There is no investment that can sustainably pay more than it earns. When someone tells you otherwise, the only question is who will pay for your credulity and how long before they run out of new people to ask.”

What makes Ponzi schemes so persistent is not their sophistication but their adaptability. Every era of financial innovation and every new communications technology has produced a fresh variant. The digital age, and the age of cryptocurrency in particular, has not eliminated this form of fraud. It has industrialised it.

THE GLOBAL RECORD

The modern history of large-scale Ponzi fraud begins, definitionally, with Bernie Madoff. For nearly four decades, Madoff operated what investigators concluded was a $20 billion scheme concealed behind the respectable façade of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC on Wall Street. He fabricated every trade, every statement, and every declared return. He was arrested in December 2008 when the financial crisis triggered redemption requests he could not honour. Sentenced to 150 years in prison, he died incarcerated in 2021. His case established the template: the longer a scheme runs without detection, the larger the losses at collapse, because the pyramid of obligation grows with every passing month.

Allen Stanford operated a Caribbean variant that devastated ordinary investors across Latin America. Stanford International Bank, based in Antigua, raised $7 billion from more than 30,000 investors, many of them in Venezuela, Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia, through fraudulent certificates of deposit bearing implausibly high interest rates. The offshore setting lent the scheme an air of sophistication. Stanford was sentenced to 110 years in federal prison in 2012.

MMM Global, the Russian pyramid scheme revived by Sergei Mavrodi and relaunched internationally in 2011, proved devastatingly effective across sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Crucially, Mavrodi did not call it an investment. He rebranded it as a mutual aid network, telling participants they were simply helping each other a framing that disarmed financial scepticism by appealing instead to community solidarity. In Nigeria alone, more than three million subscribers registered. When the scheme froze accounts in December 2016, losses were estimated at $50 million in that country alone. Similar collapses followed in Ghana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, India, and China. The human cost extended beyond money: some investors, confronted with frozen accounts and demands for additional deposits before release of funds, took their own lives. The collapse did not deter imitation; it accelerated it. Loom, Twinkas, and MBA Forex followed in rapid succession.

OneCoin, founded by the Bulgarian national Ruja Ignatova, is the most geographically dispersed cryptocurrency fraud in history. Marketed across 175 countries as a superior alternative to Bitcoin the so-called “Cryptoqueen” promoted it with the slogan “Bitcoin Killer” OneCoin raised an estimated $5.8 billion between 2014 and 2019. There was no blockchain. Every coin sold was worthless. Ignatova disappeared before prosecution, was placed on both the Europol and FBI most-wanted lists with a €5 million reward, and has not been found. Her co-founder Sebastian Greenwood was sentenced to 20 years in a United States federal prison in 2023.

Bitconnect demonstrated that a Ponzi scheme need not have a fixed headquarters or a traceable founder. Entirely digital, it operated through an international network of YouTube promoters, WhatsApp groups, and social media communities stretching from the United States to India, Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa. It promised monthly returns of 40 per cent. At its peak its market capitalisation reached $2.6 billion. When it collapsed in early 2018, the token fell from $500 to effectively zero within days.

Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX, the defining financial fraud of the current decade, operated not as a marginal platform but as the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, a fixture of congressional testimony and mainstream financial media. Prosecutors established that Bankman-Fried had diverted customer funds from FTX to Alameda Research, his private hedge fund, to finance speculative trades, political donations, and luxury properties. The exchange presented itself publicly as a model of responsible crypto management. When confidence broke in November 2022, the entire structure collapsed in under a week. Bankman-Fried was convicted on all seven counts and sentenced in March 2024 to 25 years in prison, with a forfeiture of $11 billion. He was, as one prosecutor put it, running “a house of cards on a foundation of deceit.”

The pattern across all these cases is striking in its consistency: an implausible but not outrageous promise; early payouts that generated credibility through genuine recipients; a coordinated legitimacy campaign through media and professional endorsements; and the systematic weaponisation of trust networks, whether family groups, religious communities, or social media followings, to sustain recruitment.

ETHIOPIA’S EXPANDING VULNERABILITY AND THE FINTECH INVESTMENT CASE

Ethiopia is not an isolated case, but the specific conditions of this moment make it a particularly hospitable environment for this type of fraud. Rapid digital adoption, ambitious government-backed financial inclusion programmes, a young and aspirational urban population, limited public financial literacy, and a regulatory framework that has not kept pace with the speed of fintech expansion these are precisely the conditions that Ponzi operators seek. They did not create these conditions; they exploit them.

On 27 March 2026, federal prosecutors charged Daniel Yohannes, manager of Fintech Investment PLC, with 19 counts before the Federal High Court’s Lideta Branch. The charges include fraud, conspiracy, and violations of Ethiopia’s computer crime laws. The alleged scheme drew more than 600 million birr from investors through promises to supply electric vehicles that were, in the main, never delivered.

The framing was astute. Electric vehicles are a genuine policy priority in Ethiopia, and presenting the investment as participation in the modernisation of the country’s transport sector conferred an air of national purpose. Investors were told they could acquire vehicles on favourable credit terms, with the company claiming partnerships with international manufacturers and local insurers. The entry cost was substantial: a 50 per cent deposit on vehicles priced at approximately 1.9 million birr, plus tax and licensing charges, bringing the total per-participant commitment to over 1.36 million birr.

To sustain credibility during the recruitment phase, prosecutors allege that the defendants circulated images and videos of vehicle handovers at prominent locations across Addis Ababa, and claimed that hundreds of cars had already been delivered with further shipments imminent. Investigators found that approximately 100 vehicles were in fact distributed the majority to individuals connected to the scheme itself. This is a standard technique: a small number of genuine deliveries generates the testimonial evidence that powers the next wave of recruitment.

The current operation was not Fintech Investment PLC’s first venture of this kind. Prosecutors draw a direct line to Hello Taxi and Hello Car, an earlier programme launched in 2021 that similarly promised vehicles on credit. More than 5,000 people registered. Significant funds were collected. Almost no vehicles were delivered before the programme ceased operations.

“More than 5,000 families registered with Hello Taxi. Many were teachers, civil servants, small traders people who committed years of careful savings to a promise that was never going to be kept.”

What distinguishes this case from older-generation Ethiopian fraud is its digital architecture. The prosecution has described the operation as a form of organised white-collar crime adapted to digital platforms, one that made systematic use of computer systems to disseminate misleading information and conceal the identities of its operators. The recruitment engine relied heavily on social media promotion and, critically, on endorsements by public figures. PR companies, influencers, and individuals in or near public office have all been drawn into the investigation.

This is not accidental. The professionalisation of the legitimacy-building phase the period in which a scheme must persuade potential investors that the opportunity is real before the weight of recruitment tips the structure into collapse, is one of the most significant evolutions in Ponzi design over the past decade. In an earlier era this required printed prospectuses and in-person seminars. Digital platforms have reduced the cost of manufactured credibility to near zero. A series of well-produced testimonial videos, a social media account with substantial follower counts, and an endorsement from a recognisable face can unlock access to populations that would have been unreachable a generation ago. The investors who watched footage of a car being handed over at a prominent Addis Ababa location and concluded that something real was happening were not naive; they were deceived by a deliberately constructed fiction.

Public figures who endorse financial products bear a particular responsibility, whether or not they are legally complicit in what follows. Regulatory bodies in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa have begun issuing formal guidance on influencer liability in financial promotions. Ethiopia’s relevant authorities should move in the same direction, and without delay.

WHAT MUST FOLLOW

The arrest and charging of Daniel Yohannes is a necessary step. It is emphatically not a sufficient one. For this prosecution to serve as genuine deterrence, rather than a singular event in an unbroken pattern of impunity, several things must follow.

The charge sheet references accomplices, coordinated networks, and individuals previously implicated in fraud. All participants in the scheme, lawyers, accountants, marketing professionals, influencers, and any regulatory contacts who may have facilitated or ignored warning signs must face commensurate scrutiny. Ponzi schemes do not operate in isolation. Prosecuting only their public face leaves the infrastructure intact for the next iteration.

More than 5,000 families registered under the Hello Taxi and Hello Car programmes alone. Their claims must be assessed systematically and restitution pursued wherever assets can be traced and recovered. Ethiopia’s financial regulators must also develop enforceable frameworks for digital investment platforms: mandatory registration, disclosure requirements, and clear liability provisions for promoters and endorsers. The present environment allows fraudsters to exploit the gap between the pace of fintech innovation and the pace of regulatory response — a gap that will widen unless deliberate action is taken to close it.

And finally: public financial education. The most durable protection against this class of fraud is an investing public that can recognise its warning signs guaranteed high returns, opaque business models, heavy reliance on recruitment, and a reluctance to provide clear documentation. That education cannot arrive after the schemes do. It must be embedded in schools, in community institutions, and in the public discourse now.

Charles Ponzi died in poverty in Brazil in 1949, deported and forgotten. Bernie Madoff died in a federal prison medical centre in 2021. Allen Stanford is serving 110 years. Sam Bankman-Fried is serving 25. The perpetrators of these schemes, when caught, tend to be caught thoroughly.

The problem has never been that the fraudsters escape indefinitely. The problem is the interval, the months or years during which ordinary people hand over ordinary savings in exchange for extraordinary promises, and the machinery of false credibility keeps turning. The problem is the 5,000 families who registered with Hello Taxi. The problem is the three million Nigerians who trusted MMM. The problem is every investor who watched a social media video and reasonably concluded that something real was being delivered.

The Ethiopian Tribune will continue to report on the Fintech Investment case as it proceeds through the Federal High Court. We will cover the evidence presented, the witnesses called, the defendants still at large, and the regulatory response or lack of one. The public interest in this case extends far beyond any single courtroom.

The promise of effortless returns is as old as money itself. What changes is the medium. What never changes is the mathematics.

The trial of Daniel Yohannes and associated defendants is ongoing before the Federal High Court, Lideta Branch, Addis Ababa. The Ethiopian Tribune will publish continuing coverage as proceedings develop.

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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 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.

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.

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By Sewasew Teklemariam Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

The Federal Republic of Megala Finfiney has, over the years, quietly normalised the extraordinary. Coups rebranded as “administrative reshuffles.” Budget speeches delivered entirely in metaphor. Ministers who vanish for months and resurface claiming to have been conducting “field research in remote spiritual zones” a phrase that, in any other country, would trigger a welfare check but in Megala Finfiney earns a ministerial commendation. The republic has absorbed all of it with the weary grace of a people who have simply seen too much.

But nothing, not the coups, not the metaphors, not the spiritual zones prepared anyone for what happened on Thursday 19th of March 2026 morning in Megala Finfiney, when the National Assembly failed to convene because the ruling party’s MPs were sulking.

Not a power cut. Not a security scare. Not a plague of locusts or an act of God, though God, at this point, could hardly be blamed for looking away. The Property Advancement Coalition a party that has governed Megala with the navigational confidence of a goat on a glass staircase, had published its candidate list for the upcoming elections. More than half its sitting MPs discovered they had been dropped. Not reassigned. Not “strategically repositioned for maximum national impact.” Dropped. Like a cracked clay pot from a great height, with no ceremony and no apology.

And so, in a collective act of professional abdication that would embarrass a toddler denied a biscuit, they simply did not come to work. The Speaker waited. The chamber sat empty. The microphones, accustomed to being slapped, were not even granted that dignity. The session collapsed, and the country inflation-battered, corruption-exhausted, perpetually patient, finally lost its sense of humour. Then found it again, sharper and meaner than before.

In the sprawling Merkato of Megala Finfiney, where the price of onions has risen 340% in two years and cooking oil now requires something approaching a mortgage, the reactions arrived fast and without mercy. “They didn’t come to Parliament?” said Almaz, a mother of four. “Good. They haven’t come to our lives either.” Bekele, a taxi driver with the political acuity of a man who has spent two decades stuck in traffic listening to everything, offered his own analysis: “Let them join the TikTok army. At least those boys show up.” University students nearby immediately began workshopping hashtags — #PACChallenge, #SulkingMPs with the creative energy of people who have nothing left to lose and an excellent data plan.

The Federal Bureau of Statistics, an institution that has survived three purges, two fires, and one “accidental” data wipe, had recently published figures that framed the sulk in its full, magnificent context. Inflation at 47%. Youth unemployment at 41%. The cost of a basic food basket up 137%. Corruption complaints doubled. PAC parliamentary attendance already down 36% before the MPs decided to make it a personal statement. The country was struggling. The economy was struggling. The people were struggling. The MPs were struggling with their feelings.

The government, rising to the occasion with characteristic flair, released a statement attributing the absence to “transportation challenges.” The public responded with the kind of sarcasm that deserves its own wing in a national museum. “What transportation challenges?” demanded a shopkeeper. “They have cars, drivers, fuel cards. The rest of us walk.” Another offered an alternative theory: “Maybe their cars refused to start out of shame.” This remains the most plausible explanation anyone has produced.

At the visa-processing queues where thousands of young Megala Finfiney Citizens wait in long, quiet lines for the chance to leave the mood was less comedic and more surgical. “They should go to the Gulf like the rest of us,” said Sami. “Housemaids, drivers, cleaners.” A woman nearby shook her head with the authority of someone who has considered this thoroughly. “They won’t survive. They’re too soft.” A man at the back added that asylum was always an option, before remembering that asylum seekers are no longer welcome anywhere on Earth, and quite possibly not on Mars either.

The opposition leader, MistreAbiyot Yachenfal of the Megala People’s Reform Coalition Party (MPRP), arrived at this catastrophe like a man who had been quietly preparing for it for years. Standing outside his crumbling headquarters with the composure of someone trying very hard not to skip, he delivered a statement of such cheerful devastation that it instantly achieved the status of national comedy. “These MPs were not working even when they were present,” he said. “Their absence is a public service.” He then proposed replacing them with miniature statues specifically, the same statues PAC has been installing throughout its corridor development projects, those grand national vanity exercises named, with escalating abstraction, the Corridor of National Unity, the Corridor of Corridor Planning, and the Corridor of Corridor Maintenance. “Statues don’t demand salaries,” MistreAbiyot Yachenifal explained. “Statues don’t sulk. Statues don’t flee to Dubai.” He paused for effect. “It will be the first time the chamber looks dignified.”

From Brussels, Gifty Ararssa of the Oronana Global Council took a more conspiratorial view. “It is impossible,” she said, with the measured certainty of someone who has been watching this republic for a long time, “for over 200 MPs to sulk simultaneously without coordination. This is organised. This is deliberate. This is…” she leaned forward, “Dubai.” She elaborated. The Prime Minister, she theorised, had taken them for special treatment, consistent with the national tradition of Megalan Finfiney officials disappearing to the Gulf for rest, reflection, and retail. The internet immediately obliged with memes: MPs receiving spa treatments, MPs riding camels, MPs attending a conference entitled “Healing Retreats for Disappointingly Dropped Politicians.” Her closing line entered the canon instantly: “A government that cannot face its people will always face the luxury boutiques of Dubai.”

Architecture students at Megala Polytechnic, inspired by MistreAbiyot’s proposal, submitted a formal academic paper titled “A More Reliable Parliament: Replacing MPs with Sculptural Installations.” Their suggested exhibits included The Honourable Member Who Never Arrived, The Representative of Eternal Absence, and The MP Who Voted Present in Spirit Only. They argued, with footnotes, that statues would improve attendance, reduce corruption, lower salary expenditure, and provide more honesty than the current arrangement. The Speaker has not responded, though observers note he appears to be thinking about it quite seriously.

At a tea stall near the Assembly, a group of pensioners debated the proposal with the gravity of constitutional scholars. “Statues won’t run away,” said one. “Statues don’t need per diem,” said another. “Statues don’t go to Dubai,” confirmed a third. The tea stall owner, who has been serving politicians and their critics for thirty years, offered the summation the moment required: “These MPs turned Parliament into a corridor. If the Prime Minister replaces them with corridor statues, at least the corridors will finally have purpose.”

Weeks earlier, the Prime Minister had declared that the next Parliament “would not look the same.” He was correct. It did not look the same. It did not look at all. Because it did not show up. In Megala, apparently, even prophecy has learned to manage its expectations.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

———————//——————

This text is a work of satire created solely for fictional, humorous, and literary purposes. All names, characters, political parties, institutions, and events are entirely invented. Any resemblance to real persons or entities is purely coincidental. This work is not affiliated with or endorsed by Ethiopian Tribune, and no factual claims are made about any real political situation.

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Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopian Airlines, and the Price of Personal Diplomacy in a War Zone

By E. Frashie, Senior Political Correspondent

On the morning of 12 March 2026, while Iranian ballistic missiles were still smouldering in the wreckage of Dubai International Airport’s Terminal 3, an Ethiopian Airlines aircraft lifted off from Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa. Its passenger of distinction: Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, commander-in-chief of the Ethiopian National Defence Force, and custodian of Africa’s largest airline. His destination: the United Arab Emirates. His stated purpose: a “working visit” to meet President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The timing, as millions of Ethiopians would note with quiet fury, coincided almost precisely with MBZ’s 65th birthday.

The visit has detonated a political controversy that cuts far deeper than protocol. It has forced Ethiopians at home and in the diaspora to confront uncomfortable questions about their Prime Minister’s sense of priorities, his stewardship of a flagship national institution in crisis, and whether personal affection for a Gulf monarch represents sound statecraft or dangerous vanity in the middle of a regional war.

Iranian missiles had struck the very airport he landed at. And he flew there on the airline that is losing £108 million every single week.

THE AIRLINE ON THE BRINK

To understand the full weight of this controversy, one must first reckon with the financial catastrophe enveloping Ethiopian Airlines. The airline Africa’s most profitable, most connected, and most strategically important carrier has been brought to its knees by the Middle East conflict.

ETHIOPIAN AIRLINES CRISIS — KEY FIGURES

$137Mestimated weekly revenue loss across passenger and cargo operations

100+flights cancelled per week; 15 per day on average

160cargo flights grounded weekly, severing diaspora supply chains

$100+per barrel Brent crude surge from a forecast of $62, fully unhedged

Before the conflict erupted in late February 2026, the airline operated three daily flights to Dubai, three to Tel Aviv, one to Abu Dhabi, and one to Sharjah. Today, it runs precisely two daily flights to Amman. Its entire Gulf network built painstakingly over decades has effectively collapsed overnight.

The consequences for fuel costs and insurance premiums have been equally brutal. Prior to the war, analysts at IATA had forecast that oil prices would ease to approximately $62 per barrel through 2026 a figure that underpinned the industry’s record $41 billion global profit forecast. By early March, Brent crude had soared well past $100 per barrel, exposing airlines that had abandoned fuel hedging strategies to the full ferocity of market volatility. It is into this burning financial landscape that the Prime Minister chose to fly on his own airline to celebrate his friend’s birthday. The symbolism, many would argue, is devastating.

THE MISSILES WERE ALREADY FLYING

The security dimension of this journey beggars belief on closer inspection. Iran did not merely close its airspace in the weeks preceding Abiy’s trip. It actively, repeatedly, and deliberately attacked civilian aviation infrastructure within the UAE, the very country the Prime Minister was travelling to.

Terminal 3 at Dubai International Airport, one of the world’s busiest air terminals, was struck by Iranian drones, prompting full-scale evacuation. A second attack followed within hours, with thick black smoke rising above the city’s skyline. Zayed International Airport in Abu Dhabi was also struck, killing one person and seriously injuring four others. In total, Iran launched 174 ballistic missiles at the UAE during the initial assault phase, with 689 drones deployed, 44 of which caused confirmed impact within the country. Targets included the Palm Jumeirah, the Burj Al Arab, Jebel Ali Port, and a French naval base. Six civilians were killed in the UAE from Iranian strikes.

The theoretical danger is chilling: had an Iranian missile or drone struck Ethiopian Airlines’ aircraft as it approached or departed Dubai International, who would bear responsibility? Iran would almost certainly deny deliberate targeting, characterising any such incident as collateral damage from strikes on US-allied Gulf infrastructure a defence Tehran has already rehearsed after striking a hotel it justified as hosting American military personnel. Ethiopia, a non-combatant with no leverage over Tehran and no meaningful military alliances, would have had no mechanism whatsoever to hold Iran accountable. The tragedy would simply be absorbed.

THE DIASPORA SEVERED FROM HOME

Beyond the geopolitical drama lies a quieter, more intimate human cost that has been largely overlooked in the noise of high politics: the severing of Ethiopia’s diaspora communities from the cultural lifeline that connects them to home.

Ethiopian Airlines has long served a function that transcends commerce. For the millions of Ethiopians living in Washington DC, Stockholm, Oslo, Toronto, and across the Gulf, the airline’s cargo holds carry something more precious than freight: fresh injera, delivered within 24 hours of being baked in Addis Ababa or Gondar. Companies such as Mama Fresh ship injera to Washington DC six days per week, to Sweden three times weekly, and to Norway twice weekly. Before the conflict, this supply chain operated with quiet, extraordinary efficiency and it flowed almost entirely through the Gulf hubs that are now either closed or under fire.

The scale of this trade is significant. In the first quarter of 2022 alone, teff injera exports earned $36 million in three months, accounting for 44.4% of all Ethiopian food and beverage export earnings. An estimated 6.5 million small-scale farmers depend on teff cultivation for their livelihoods. And it has all been cut. For diaspora Ethiopians in the Gulf states particularly, the irony is acute and painful: their Prime Minister was physically present in that warzone not to attend to his countrymen’s welfare, but to deliver birthday greetings to a billionaire autocrat.

THE VOICE OF SUPPORT: ‘A MASTER STROKE OF DEPENDENCY MANAGEMENT’

Not everyone views the visit as reckless. Within Abiy’s Prosperity Party and amongst his core supporters particularly those who argue that the UAE relationship is existential for Ethiopia’s economic survival a different narrative has emerged, forcefully if not always convincingly.

“People misunderstand what this relationship represents,” argues a senior policy adviser aligned with the Prosperity Party who spoke to this correspondent on background. “The UAE has underwritten Ethiopian financial stability for years. Abu Dhabi’s billions have been the single most important external factor in preventing a sovereign debt collapse. When MBZ invites you, you go. That is not personal weakness, that is the arithmetic of survival.”

Some diplomatic observers in Addis Ababa echo this view, albeit cautiously. A Western envoy who requested anonymity noted: “Abiy’s relationship with MBZ is not simply personal. The UAE has strategic interests in the Horn of Africa, Red Sea access, counter-Islamist positioning, commercial investment and Abiy is their primary interlocutor. Maintaining that channel, even symbolically, has real value.” Prosperity Party loyalists pointed further to the 2018 peace deal with Eritrea, brokered partly through UAE facilitation, as evidence that personal diplomacy with Gulf leaders yields concrete results.

THE OPPOSITION’S FURY: ‘CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE OF THE NATION’S ASSETS’

Opposition voices were far less measured, one party issued a formal statement describing the visit as “an inexcusable dereliction of duty during a national economic emergency,” while calling on parliament to demand a full account of the trip’s costs and stated objectives.

• “Ethiopian Airlines belongs to the Ethiopian people. It is not the Prime Minister’s private jet.“🛩️

Oromo federalist opposition figures were equally pointed, framing the visit as emblematic of a broader pattern of governance they characterise as Gulf-dependent, personalised, and disconnected from ordinary Ethiopian suffering. “While the diaspora cannot get injera,” said one opposition parliamentarian, “the Prime Minister is eating birthday cake in Dubai. This image will not be forgotten.“

Academic voices added intellectual weight to the critique a Professor of Addis Ababa University’s Institute of Political Studies argued that the visit represented a structural failure: “Modern statecraft has abundant tools for symbolic personal communication encrypted video conferencing, personal envoys, handwritten letters delivered by senior ministers. The physical presence of a head of state in an active conflict zone serves no purpose that these instruments cannot replicate, at a fraction of the cost and precisely zero risk.”

THE VIRTUAL COMMUNICATION QUESTION

This brings us to perhaps the most damaging and unanswerable critique of the entire episode: in 2026, was this journey necessary at all? Heads of state communicate through secure video conferencing systems, encrypted diplomatic channels, personal envoys of ministerial rank, and private correspondence on a daily basis. The G7, the African Union, the United Nations all conduct substantive diplomacy routinely without physical presence.

Even MBZ himself was actively managing a wartime crisis when Abiy arrived, visiting wounded patients in hospital and publicly declaring that the UAE was “in a period of war.” The idea that this was the right moment for a visiting African leader’s birthday call strains credulity. A personal birthday message could have been delivered by video call in four minutes. A handwritten letter of solidarity, co-signed by Ethiopia’s Foreign Minister, would have conveyed the same personal warmth, the same political signal of alignment, and the same bilateral goodwill without placing an aircraft over bombed runways, or leaving Ethiopia’s diaspora watching their Prime Minister fly into a warzone while they cannot receive a delivery of injera.

THE VERDICT: STATECRAFT OR SENTIMENT?

The defence of this visit ultimately rests on a single pillar: that Abiy’s personal relationship with MBZ is so financially and diplomatically valuable to Ethiopia that its maintenance justifies almost any sacrifice. It is an argument that has some merit in the abstract. Ethiopia’s dependence on UAE financial support is real, documented, and consequential.

But the argument collapses when subjected to elementary scrutiny. If the visit produced concrete relief, emergency fuel cost agreements, financial support for the airline’s losses, guarantees of airspace access, or accelerated cargo resumption for diaspora supply chains, there is no evidence of it. The Ethiopian government has announced nothing. Ethiopian Airlines has received no reported bailout. The injera flights remain grounded.

What the visit did produce, beyond birthday greetings, is a political image that will be difficult to erase: the Prime Minister of one of the world’s poorest nations, on the aircraft of its cash-haemorrhaging flagship airline, landing at an airport that had been bombed twice in 48 hours, to wish a billionaire autocrat a happy birthday. In the annals of Ethiopian political symbolism, few images have been so costly or so avoidable.

The question for Ethiopians is not whether the UAE relationship matters. It does, profoundly. The question is whether this particular trip, at this particular moment, served Ethiopia or whether it served only the personal comfort of a Prime Minister who has, perhaps, allowed the warmth of a friendship to cloud his judgement about when the nation’s airline, the nation’s reputation, and the lives aboard that aircraft are simply too precious a thing to risk. On the current evidence, history will struggle to find a convincing answer in favour of the flight.

———————//——————

E. Frashie is Senior Political Correspondent at The Ethiopian Tribune, covering governance, aviation, and Horn of Africa geopolitics.

Views expressed are those of the author and do not represent the editorial position of The Ethiopian Tribune.

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By Endex The Ethiopian Tribune editor in chief

Opinion & Analysis

There is a particular kind of arrogance embedded in the way certain international media institutions cover Africa. It is not always the arrogance of open hostility that would at least be straightforward to contest. It is, rather, the arrogance of the editorial template: the quiet, institutional assumption that a continent of fifty-four nations and a billion-plus souls can be adequately explained through a rotating cast of familiar imagery famine, fragmentation, and failure. Ethiopia has endured this treatment for decades. What demands urgent examination today is not merely that it persists, but who is perpetuating it, why, and what Ethiopia ought to do in response.
Al Jazeera, the Doha-based broadcaster funded by the Qatari state, has positioned itself globally as the voice of the underdog, the challenger of Western media hegemony, the outlet that speaks truth to power. It is a seductive proposition, and in certain contexts, notably its early coverage of the Arab Spring, it was not without merit. Yet when the camera turns toward Ethiopia, something rather revealing happens to that self-proclaimed editorial conscience. The underdog disappears. The complexity vanishes. What remains is a country rendered perpetually crisis-ridden, politically naïve, and diplomatically inconsequential.
This is not an accident. It is a pattern, and patterns in journalism are never merely stylistic.

The Architecture of a Double Standard
Academic scrutiny of Al Jazeera’s reporting on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) has produced findings that should embarrass any institution claiming journalistic neutrality. Research by Aqalh and Abdul-Nabi (2026) demonstrates that the network’s coverage systematically “privileges Egyptian existential narratives whilst minimising Ethiopian developmental claims.” Abebe, Tilahun, and Belay (2024) reach a complementary conclusion, finding that Al Jazeera “foregrounds conflict frames at the expense of cooperative or technical frames” when reporting the Ethio-Egyptian dispute. Nigatu and Lidetie (2025) are yet more direct, arguing that “the discursive privileging of Egyptian claims reflects broader regional power dynamics rather than journalistic neutrality.”
Let us be plain about what this means. When Ethiopia constructs a dam on the Blue Nile, a sovereign infrastructure project on its own territory, financed by its own citizens through bond purchases, designed to lift tens of millions out of energy poverty, Al Jazeera frames this as aggression. When Egypt invokes the language of existential threat to describe a dam it has no legal authority to veto, Al Jazeera amplifies that framing with minimal interrogation. The asymmetry is not subtle, and it is not neutral. It is, to borrow a phrase the network itself would deploy without hesitation in other contexts, state-serving propaganda dressed in the clothing of public interest journalism.
This double standard becomes yet more conspicuous when Al Jazeera trains its editorial eye upon Ethiopian journalists and social media influencers allegedly paid to promote Israeli narratives without disclosure. The ethical failures in question are genuine. Undisclosed sponsored travel is a serious breach of journalistic integrity, and it warrants honest, vigorous accountability. But Al Jazeera’s framing of these individual cases does not stop at ethical critique. It extrapolates, implying a broader Ethiopian susceptibility to manipulation, a national gullibility, as though the misconduct of a handful of individuals reveals something essentially true and damning about Ethiopia as a political society. One struggles to recall Al Jazeera applying the same extrapolative logic to, say, British journalists compromised by government access, or American commentators embedded with Gulf state public relations operations. The standard, it seems, applies selectively, and the selection tells us a great deal.

The Geopolitics Beneath the Editorial Line
Al Jazeera’s coverage of Ethiopia cannot be understood without understanding Qatar. The network is not an independent editorial enterprise in the manner it presents itself; it is a state-funded broadcaster whose editorial orientations are inevitably shaped by Qatari foreign policy priorities. Qatar has significant strategic interests in the Horn of Africa. It has mediated, with mixed results and considerable self-interest, in various regional disputes. Its relationships with Egypt, with various Islamist political movements, and with competing Gulf powers all create a web of geopolitical incentives that bear directly upon how its flagship broadcaster chooses to cover a country like Ethiopia.
When Al Jazeera foregrounds Ethiopian instability, it is not simply making an editorial judgement about newsworthiness. It is whether consciously or through the more insidious mechanism of institutionalised editorial culture, producing a representation of Ethiopia that serves certain regional actors and their preferred narratives. A fractious, fragile, easily-manipulated Ethiopia is convenient for those who wish to portray the GERD as reckless rather than visionary, who wish to frame Ethiopian foreign policy as reactive rather than strategic, who wish, in short, to diminish Ethiopia’s standing in a region where it remains, despite everything, the most populous nation and the diplomatic anchor of the African Union.
This is media as geopolitical instrument. It deserves to be named as such.

The History That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Perhaps the most intellectually dishonest feature of Al Jazeera’s recent Ethiopia coverage is what it refuses to remember. Ethiopia is home to one of Africa’s largest refugee populations — not as a transit country, but as a host. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people from Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen have found sanctuary on Ethiopian soil. Syrians who fled the catastrophic civil war that Al Jazeera covered with such sustained passion built lives in Addis Ababa, opened businesses, integrated into communities welcomed, for the most part, without the violent xenophobia that has disfigured the response of certain wealthier nations considerably better placed to absorb displacement. This is an extraordinary humanitarian record. Al Jazeera, so reliably attentive to refugee suffering when it serves a particular narrative, has shown remarkably little interest in it here.
More glaring still is the erasure of Ethiopia’s history with Palestine. Ethiopia was among the earliest African nations to extend formal support to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Yasir Arafat addressed African leaders at the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa; Ethiopia voted consistently in multilateral forums for Palestinian self-determination; Ethiopian diplomacy maintained active solidarity with Palestinian representatives at a time when such solidarity carried genuine political cost. This is not contested history. It is documented, verifiable, and, one might think, precisely the kind of historical context that a broadcaster claiming to champion the Palestinian cause would consider relevant when reporting on Ethiopian figures accused of normalisation.
The omission is not an oversight. Omissions of this magnitude are editorial choices, and editorial choices have politics. By stripping this history from its coverage, Al Jazeera constructs an Ethiopia that appears opportunistic, indifferent, or simply ignorant, when the historical record suggests something rather different. It is a fabrication by deletion, and it is no less dishonest for being achieved through silence rather than falsehood.

The Weaponisation of Ethical Critique
It would be foolish to dismiss the ethical questions surrounding undisclosed sponsored content. Ethiopian journalists, influencers, and public figures who accepted Israeli government-linked hospitality without transparency owe their audiences an explanation, and the institutions responsible for upholding professional standards in Ethiopian media must take this seriously. There is real work to be done here, and it must be done by Ethiopians critically, rigorously, and without defensiveness.
But Al Jazeera’s intervention in this conversation is not a contribution to that work. It is an exploitation of it. By transforming individual ethical failures into evidence of systemic national vulnerability, the network performs a rhetorical manoeuvre with which African countries are depressingly familiar: the individualisation of misconduct when the individual is sympathetic, and the nationalisation of misconduct when the nation is a useful target. The miscreant becomes the country; the country becomes the cautionary tale; and Al Jazeera, whose own editorial record includes systematic bias in its coverage of Qatar’s regional rivals, Egypt’s political upheavals, and the Syrian catastrophe, positions itself as moral arbiter.
This is audacity of a remarkable order. It ought to be said so, plainly and in public.

Reclaiming the Story
None of this analysis should be mistaken for an argument that Ethiopia’s image problems are entirely externally manufactured. There are genuine governance challenges, genuine humanitarian crises, genuine failures of accountability that Ethiopian citizens, including this columnist, have every right and obligation to scrutinise honestly. The integrity of Ethiopian public discourse depends upon exactly that kind of internal accountability. Narrative sovereignty is not a licence for self-flattery.
But there is a meaningful difference between honest internal critique and the systematic, geopolitically-motivated distortion of a country’s image by a foreign state broadcaster with its own interests to protect. Ethiopia is entitled to contest the latter even whilst engaging in the former. Indeed, the two are inseparable: a society confident enough in its own critical institutions is far better equipped to push back against external misrepresentation precisely because it has already done the harder work of honest self-examination.
What is required, practically, is investment in Ethiopian media institutions of genuine independence, in scholarly work that produces the kind of evidence-based counter-analysis demonstrated by researchers at Addis Ababa University and Jimma University, in diplomatic and cultural channels that carry Ethiopian perspectives into international conversations without waiting for the permission of hostile intermediaries. The work of Abebe, Tilahun, and Belay (2024), of Nigatu and Lidetie (2025), of Ayalew (2021) — this is exactly the kind of intellectual infrastructure upon which narrative sovereignty is built. It needs to be resourced, disseminated, and taken seriously by Ethiopian institutions at every level.

A Final Remark
Al Jazeera will, in all probability, continue to cover Ethiopia through the lens of crisis, conflict, and selective moral outrage. The incentives that produce such coverage have not changed. What can change is Ethiopia’s posture in relation to it , from passive subject to active interlocutor, from recipient of external narratives to producer of its own.
Ethiopia’s story, its complexity, its resilience, its genuinely extraordinary diplomatic and humanitarian record, is too important to be left to those with every reason to tell it badly.
It is time to tell it ourselves.

——————-//——————-

References
Abebe, T., Tilahun, M. & Belay, S. (2024) Media Framing of the Ethio-Egyptian Dispute over the First Round Water Filling of GERD: ETV and Al Jazeera in Focus. Addis Ababa University Press.

Aqalh, A. & Abdul-Nabi, M. (2026) Framing of Ethiopia–Egypt Dam Conflict: A Comparative Analysis of Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya. Emerald Publishing. DOI: 10.1108/978-1-80592-949-920261005.

Ayalew, M. (2021) Framing of the Ethio-Egypt Conflict on GERD’s Water Filling: ETV and Al-Jazeera in Focus. MA Thesis, Jimma University.

Nigatu, M. & Lidetie, A. (2025) ‘Sovereignty vs Survival: A Critical Discourse Analysis of BBC and Al-Jazeera’s Reporting on GERD Negotiations’, Cogent Arts & Humanities, 12(1). DOI: 10.1080/23311983.2025.2451486.

Ojola, D. (2025) Framing Analysis of BBC and Al Jazeera Coverage of the Ethiopia–Somaliland MoU. University of Helsinki.

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How a Young Woman from EPRP is Rewriting Ethiopian Political Theatre and What the Ruling Party’s Silence on That Debate Stage Truly Revealed

By Sewasew Teklemariam the Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

There is a particular kind of silence that speaks louder than argument. It is the silence that descends upon a room when someone has said the unsayable with perfect precision, when an accusation is so well-documented, so calmly delivered, and so unanswerable that the only available response is the panicked shuffle of papers and the avoidance of eye contact. That silence fell upon the representatives of Ethiopia’s ruling Prosperity Party during the country’s first major televised multi-party debate of the 2026 election cycle. The person who produced it was not a veteran statesman, not a celebrated economist, not a familiar face from the long and exhausted gallery of Ethiopian opposition politics. She was a former television journalist in her early thirties, representing a coalition whose symbol is a thumbs-up, whose name is Mistresilasie Tamerat, and who, in one broadcast hour, did more damage to the government’s democratic pretensions than two decades of politely worded opposition press releases ever managed.

Ethiopia is preparing to hold its seventh national election in June 2026, with 24 national and 45 regional political parties contesting for power in what many analysts describe as a critical test of the country’s democratic evolution, a description that grows more ironic the more closely one examines the conditions under which that evolution is supposedly occurring. The scale is impressive on paper: 1,300 candidates nationwide, 936 for regional councils, a National Electoral Board with a mandate and a calendar. The substance is considerably less so. Political prisoners remain detained. Conflicts rage in the Amhara region and beyond. The media landscape is captive. International observation is uncertain. In this context, Mistresilasie Tamerat stood before the cameras and said, with the composure of someone who had been waiting for precisely this moment: we do not believe that the electoral process can be described as fair, democratic, or independent. She did not flinch. Neither did the camera.

Her background is essential to understanding the force of the moment. She trained as a journalist and worked as a reporter and political affairs analyst at Asham TV, a career that gave her something most Ethiopian opposition politicians conspicuously lack: the ability to communicate complex arguments clearly, quickly, and under the pressure of broadcast conditions. When she transitioned from journalism into active politics, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party one of the country’s oldest opposition formations, founded in the radical crucible of the 1970s student movement received her and, unusually for a party in a political culture dominated by elderly men, entrusted her with its most senior administrative post: secretary-general. The party also made her coalition secretary for the “Cooperation for Ethiopian Unity,” the five-party alliance that now stands before the Ethiopian electorate with its thumbs raised.

She has said as much herself. The political space, in her own precise formulation, is dominated by long-established figures, and penetrating its leadership structures requires persistence and resilience. Being both young and female in that environment means perpetual proof-of-concept, an exhausting requirement applied to no comparable male colleague of similar ability. What the debate demonstrated is that she has cleared that bar so comprehensively that the requirement itself begins to look absurd. She did not participate in the debate. She commanded it.

“Being both young and female often means having to prove oneself repeatedly in environments where experience is measured narrowly and leadership is traditionally defined.”

The four arguments she deployed were not improvised. They were the product of a politician who understands that in a televised debate, the purpose is not to persuade the other side but to expose it. Her first line of attack concerned political prisoners, specifically, the more than 300 ordinary citizens reported detained in the Amhara region alone, some in connection with the Fano armed movement, others for no apparent reason beyond identity. This was not rhetoric. It was documentation. The Prosperity Party has invested considerable effort in framing the Amhara conflict as a security matter: a necessary state response to armed rebellion, regrettable but inevitable. Mistresilasie relocated that framing to the electoral arena, where it becomes something else entirely evidence that the conditions for a free election do not exist, that citizens are being detained for who they are rather than what they have done, and that any government which presides over this whilst simultaneously claiming democratic legitimacy is engaged in a contradiction it cannot resolve in front of a camera.

Her second argument, that one cannot speak credibly of democratic competition while war continues, was delivered with similar precision. She went further than most opposition politicians dare, calling not merely for ceasefire but for genuine, inclusive negotiations that encompass armed groups currently excluded from peace processes. This is the argument that sustainable peace cannot be achieved through exclusion, and it is one that speaks directly to the lived reality of millions of Ethiopians whose relationship with the state has been defined by violence rather than representation. The Prosperity Party’s representatives had nothing to offer in response that would not have required them to publicly justify policies they had spent considerable energy trying not to discuss.

The arguments on media independence and international observers were, in some ways, the most devastating precisely because they were the least dramatic. They required no statistics, no documentation of specific abuses, no emotional appeal. They required only the observation that these are the minimum conditions for any democratic process worthy of the name conditions so basic that their absence does not require lengthy argument, merely acknowledgement. The government’s representatives could not acknowledge them without conceding the point. They could not deny them without appearing to endorse a system of managed elections. They were, in the language of debate, trapped. The silence that followed was the sound of that trap closing.

The Prosperity Party excels at spectacle. What it struggles with is the rough-and-tumble of genuine democratic accountability and on that stage, there was nowhere left to hide.

It would be too simple to attribute this merely to the personal failings of the individuals who represented the ruling party on that stage. The deeper truth is structural. A party that has governed with the concentrated authority of the Prosperity Party, that has systematically dismantled independent judicial oversight, suppressed critical media, and treated dissent as a category of disloyalty , cannot easily produce, on short notice, the kind of confident, substantive defenders that open democratic debate requires. The machinery of authoritarian governance is not designed to generate intellectual accountability. It is designed to suppress the need for it. When that suppression fails — when someone stands before the cameras and refuses to be managed, the system has no response prepared, because it had convinced itself the moment would never come.

The Ethiopian Citizens for Social Justice , EZEMA, occupies a different position in this story, and in some respects a more troubling one. EZEMA is, by most measures, the most institutionally coherent of the major opposition formations. It has a recognisable leadership, an urban electoral base, and a track record of participating in the formal processes of Ethiopian politics. It also has a track record, less frequently discussed, of accommodation. During the 2021 elections, EZEMA positioned itself against the formation of a transitional government at the precise moment when such a government represented the most credible alternative to the ruling party’s dominance. The practical effect of this position was to align EZEMA, at a critical juncture, with the preferences of the party it nominally opposed. In Addis Ababa in 2021, EZEMA and Balderas together received approximately 32 per cent of the capital’s vote and won zero seats in parliament a result that tells you everything you need to know about the electoral system, but also something important about the limits of a strategy built on institutional respectability rather than principled confrontation.

One of EZEMA’s own representatives captured this posture with an inadvertent candour before this year’s election. Despite the ongoing conditions the detentions, the lack of media freedom, the contested electoral environment the party acknowledged it had “no option but to participate in the election, if the government proceeds on its current track.” It is a sentence worth reading twice. It concedes the entire argument. It acknowledges that the conditions are inadequate. It then proceeds to participate anyway, not out of confidence but out of resignation. Compare this to Mistresilasie’s formulation: the process cannot be described as fair, democratic, or independent and here are the specific conditions that must change before it can be. One is a statement of principles with demands attached. The other is a statement of defeat dressed as pragmatism. The contrast, aired before a national television audience, was merciless.

The social media dimension of this story is not a footnote. Ethiopia is a country with a median age below 20. An overwhelming majority of its population has known no political dispensation other than the EPRP’s former enemies and, since 2018, the Prosperity Party. This is a generation whose relationship with politics has been defined by spectacle without accountability, by promises without delivery, and by the particular exhaustion that comes from watching one’s country torn apart by conflicts that feel simultaneously inevitable and entirely unnecessary. The appetite for a political figure who is young, female, articulate, and genuinely confrontational was not manufactured by social media. It was waiting. Mistresilasie gave it somewhere to go.

By contrast, the opening statements by ESDP and EZEMA, positioned at [00:04:53–00:08:15], produced what the analytics reveal as a characteristic “dip”: that moment, well known to anyone who has studied long-form political broadcast data, when casual viewers make their decision to stay or leave. ESDP’s pitch of gradual reform and EZEMA’s invocation of social justice are not unworthy positions. But they are positions that a viewer already fatigued by years of unfulfilled political promises will recognise and, the data suggests, will choose not to engage with further. The drop-off at this juncture is a verdict rendered not in ballot boxes but in closed browser tabs, and it is a verdict that the parties concerned would do well to examine. A political platform that cannot hold a free audience’s attention for eight minutes of prime-time debate is a platform with a communication problem that no amount of ideological refinement will resolve. The audience did not leave because the arguments were wrong. They left because the arguments felt familiar in the worst possible sense: competent, cautious, and utterly unexciting.

The TikTok virality, the comment threads declaring “she is who we wanted to become” these are not merely expressions of admiration for a single politician. They are an expression of political hunger: the demand of a generation for representation that actually looks like them, speaks like them, and is willing to say in public what they say to one another in private. That this hunger has found its focus in someone representing a coalition whose electoral history is modest and whose internal consolidation is incomplete is, simultaneously, the most interesting and the most precarious aspect of the current moment.

Because this column owes its readers scepticism as well as appreciation, certain questions must be put. Mistresilasie Tamerat has demonstrated, with considerable flair, the capacity to articulate what is wrong with Ethiopian politics and the electoral environment in which it currently operates. She has been notably less specific about what her coalition’s governance would look like in practice. Social democratic ideology and a commitment to equitable development are principles. They are not, in themselves, a programme for managing a country with rampant inflation, a currency under significant pressure, endemic unemployment, and a security situation that cannot be wished away with negotiations, however inclusive. The debate stage rewards the sharp identification of failures. Governing requires the harder discipline of proposing credible remedies.

The coalition’s internal cohesion presents a further question. Of the five parties that formed the Cooperation for Ethiopian Unity alliance, only three remain actively engaged in the electoral process. A coalition that cannot fully consolidate before the election begins is one whose ability to hold together under the pressures of governance or even the pressures of a contested result must be considered uncertain. And whilst the demand for minimum conditions before participation is principled, the coalition has not yet articulated the clear red line that would tell the public: if these conditions remain unmet, we will withdraw and say publicly why. Without that line, the demand for conditions risks becoming a rhetorical position rather than a constitutional one.

None of which should obscure the significance of what has already happened. In a debate that the ruling party entered expecting to perform its usual controlled dominance, a young woman representing a minority coalition with a thumbs-up symbol and a name that translates as the Secret of the Trinity walked onto the stage and turned the performance inside out. She exposed the Prosperity Party’s inability to defend its record under genuine scrutiny. She implicitly indicted EZEMA’s decades of dignified accommodation. She gave the youngest generation of Ethiopians a face to attach to the possibility of a different kind of politics. She did all of this calmly, precisely, and entirely on her own terms.

“In a political landscape where the bar for meaningful opposition is depressingly low, she cleared it with visible ease and the camera caught every moment.”

The numbers, as it happens, are not merely anecdotal. An analysis of the YouTube broadcast of the seventh general election’s first debate officially titled “የ7ኛው ጠቅላላ ምርጫ የመጀመሪያው የክርክር መድረክ” reveals a viewing pattern that tells its own story about where public attention truly resided during more than two hours of broadcast. The Coalition for Ethiopian Unity, known by its Amharic designation TIBIBIR, did not merely win the argument in the room. It won the audience at home, repeatedly, and at the moments that mattered most.

The broadcast’s viewership data identifies four distinct peaks where audience engagement spiked, and the pattern is instructive. The first came at [00:02:18], barely two minutes into proceedings, when inter-party friction first surfaced during the direct questioning phase the segment in which each party had two minutes to put questions directly to its opponents. YouTube’s retention analytics consistently show that confrontational exchange drives re-engagement: viewers who have wandered lean back in; those who had the broadcast running in the background pick it up. The second, and arguably most consequential, peak arrived at [02:05:12] the precise moment at which the TIBIBIR representative delivered her direct assessment of the Prosperity government’s economic record. The single word “failed” is, in broadcast terms, what analysts call a high-engagement unit: a declaration short enough to clip, sharp enough to share, and specific enough to be held accountable. The critique of the cost of living, the inability to pay rent, to afford daily meals, moved the debate from the abstractly political to the viscerally personal, producing the kind of resonance that generates not just initial views but re-watches, the metric that most accurately measures genuine impact. Within one minute, at [02:06:13], a second peak followed, driven by the explanation of the coalition’s campaign symbol, the raised thumb, and the closing appeal to voters. Audiences who skip to the end of long political broadcasts are not disengaged; they are specifically seeking the summary, the verdict, the moment of meaning. The fact that TIBIBIR’s symbol and final statement produced a measurable viewership spike at exactly this point suggests that the coalition had successfully generated sufficient curiosity earlier in the broadcast that viewers returned to hear how it concluded.

The coalition did not merely win the debate. According to the broadcast’s own viewership curve, it owned the moments the audience came back to watch twice.

There is a lesson here that extends well beyond the mechanics of YouTube analytics. Political communication in the digital age does not reward the measured and the moderate. It rewards the specific, the confrontational, and the emotionally resonant. Mistresilasie Tamerat did not go viral because she was young or because she was female, though both facts added to the novelty of the moment. She went viral because she said something true, in plain language, to a camera, without flinching. In a media environment flooded with managed statements and rehearsed equivocation, that quality, the quality of simply meaning what one says, is rarer and more powerful than any focus-grouped slogan. The viewership data confirms what the debate room already knew: when she spoke, people stopped scrolling.

The thumbs-up is, in the end, a simple gesture. It means: yes. Yes, there is something worth approving of here. Yes, this is possible. Yes, we see you. In the context of an Ethiopian election whose integrity remains in serious doubt, whose conditions remain deeply problematic, and whose outcome remains controlled by forces that have never willingly relinquished power, this small affirmative gesture is either a political act of considerable bravery or a symbol that will be crushed, like so many before it, beneath the weight of the system it challenges.

Which of these it turns out to be will be determined not in one debate, however memorable, but in the months that follow in whether the coalition holds, in whether the conditions are partially met or entirely ignored, in whether the international community chooses to observe or to avert its gaze, and in whether a generation of young Ethiopians can convert the emotional energy of a TikTok moment into the harder, slower, more dangerous work of political organisation. Mistresilasie Tamerat has earned the right to be taken seriously. Ethiopia has not yet earned the right to call what is happening a democracy. Between those two facts lies the entire story of this election.

The debate has begun. Whether it will be permitted to conclude on the people’s terms is the only question that matters.

The Ethiopian Tribune is an independent publication. This column reflects political analysis and does not constitute endorsement of any party or candidate.

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

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By Endex, the Chief Editor, Ethiopian Tribune

I have been a journalist for many years. I have written obituaries for kings and eulogies for activists, reported on wars and chronicled elections. But there are moments in a writing life when the subject demands not a report, but a confession a piece written not from the head alone, but from the marrow of one’s own story. This is such a moment. And the man who demands it is Haile Gerima.

Let me begin where it truly begins for me: 1993. A small cinema tucked away off Portobello Road in West London. It is a blustery autumn evening, and I have been dragged there, there is no more honest word, by a university friend whose enthusiasm for Ethiopian cinema far exceeded my own. She told me that a professor and filmmaker named Haile Gerima had made a film about slavery. She told me he had mentored extraordinary talent. She told me he was one of ours. I confess I was not immediately convinced. But I went.

What happened inside that cinema changed something in me permanently.

A Revelation Off Portobello Road

The film was Sankofa. Named for the Ghanaian Akan word meaning ‘to go back, look for, and gain wisdom, power and hope’, it follows a Black American fashion model who undergoes a harrowing spiritual journey to a plantation in the antebellum American South. In lesser hands, this could have been melodrama, or worse, exploitation. In Gerima’s hands, it was something I had never encountered before in a cinema and have rarely encountered since: truth delivered with the full force of art.

I felt it from the opening frames. The visual language was unlike anything Hollywood had offered us raw yet luminous, poetic yet unflinching, expressionist in the way that only a filmmaker who has absorbed both African storytelling traditions and the radical energy of the American counter-cinema movement could achieve. Sankofa was formally ambitious to a degree that seemed almost reckless, and yet every choice was earned. When the drums sounded and the spirits of the enslaved rose from the floors of Cape Coast Castle, I was not watching a film. I was bearing witness.

The respect I felt rising in me during those two hours was immense, the kind of respect one cannot manufacture or perform. It came from recognising craftsmanship of the highest order in service of a moral imperative that could not be ignored. Here was a man who had spent twenty years researching the trans-Atlantic slave trade, who had been rejected by every major American distributor, and who had taken his film city by city, cinema by cinema, to Black communities across the United States until the world had no choice but to take notice. The film that no one would distribute was eventually ranked by Harvard Film Studies professors as one of the most essential films in the history of world cinema between 1980 and 2000. But that evening in Notting Hill, I knew none of this. I only knew what I felt.

When he stepped onto the stage for the Q&A, the room shifted. Here was my fellow countryman, standing with grace and quiet dignity and I felt, for the first time in a long while, the particular pride of shared origin.

He spoke about the sacrifices behind the work. He spoke with a candour that was electrifying, and at moments heartbreaking the years of fundraising, the rejections, the loneliness of making films that the industry did not want, the determination to carry stories that others feared to touch. I remember sitting very still. It was the kind of stillness that falls over you when you are in the presence of something authentic. He was not performing humility. He simply had the ease of a man who had decided, long ago, what he was for and had never wavered.

I left that cinema altered. I had gone in knowing almost nothing about Haile Gerima. I came out knowing that I would follow his work for the rest of my life.

Born in Gondar, Shaped by the World

To understand Haile Gerima is to understand where he came from. He was born on 4 March 1946 in Gondar a city of ancient castles and highland winds in northern Ethiopia, a place that carries centuries of royal history in its very stones. His father was a playwright and dramatist who toured the Ethiopian countryside staging local theatre; his mother was a teacher. The house he grew up in was saturated with storytelling, with the Amharic oral tradition, with the fierce independence of a people who had never been colonised, not fully, not finally and who knew it.

In 1967, at twenty-one, he left for the United States first to study drama at the Goodman School in Chicago, then to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he would discover the cinema that would become his weapon and his calling. At UCLA, he fell in with an extraordinary cohort of Black, Chicano, Asian, and international students who collectively refused the grammar of Hollywood. They formed what would later be known as the L.A. Rebellion, a movement that sought to build an entirely alternative, politically conscious, aesthetically radical Black American cinema. Haile Gerima is one of its most towering figures.

His early films announced him immediately. Harvest: 3,000 Years, made in Ethiopia in 1975, won the Grand Prize at the Locarno Film Festival. Bush Mama, made the following year, was a searing portrait of Black poverty and resistance in Los Angeles. Ashes and Embers followed in 1982, winning awards in Lisbon and earning recognition at the Berlinale. Each film was stamping his name deeper into the conscience of world cinema, even as mainstream Hollywood looked the other way.

A Question at SOAS, and an Answer That Stayed With Me

Some years after that first encounter in Notting Hill, I saw him again, this time at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, at the premiere of his documentary Adwa. The film concerned the extraordinary Battle of Adwa in 1896, when Ethiopian forces under Emperor Menelik II defeated the Italian colonial army in one of the most significant military victories in African history: the first time an African nation had routed a European colonial power on the battlefield.

I was curious about the funding. The film, I had learned, had received Italian backing. This troubled me in a way I could not entirely articulate. Italy was the defeated party. Italy was, in the deepest sense, the villain of the story. Why had Gerima accepted their money? Was there not a risk, however subtle, of the narrative being shaped by the very power whose humiliation it documented?

I put the question to him after the screening. His answer was simple, disarming, and utterly characteristic of the man: no one else had been willing to finance it. The Ethiopian government had not come forward. The international co-production community had not come forward. The Italians had. And so he had taken their money, looked them calmly in the eye, and made a film that placed Ethiopia’s resistance and pride at its absolute centre, a film grounded in historical truth and the testimonies of those who had fought, refusing to soften a single frame of what Italy’s colonialism had meant.

He had taken the coloniser’s resources and turned them into a monument to the colonised. This is a particular kind of genius political, artistic, moral.

I walked away from SOAS that evening with a deeper understanding of what it means to operate without institutional support, without the safety net of a nation-state willing to fund its own history. Gerima had not waited. He had never waited. He had found whatever resource was available and bent it to the service of truth. This, I came to understand, was the defining characteristic of his entire career.

Teza, and the Courage to Look Inward

When Teza arrived in 2008, his first feature in nearly a decade, it felt like a homecoming of the most complicated kind. The film is a profoundly personal and politically courageous work, following an Ethiopian intellectual who returns home from Germany during the brutal era of the Derg military junta. It is a film about the particular tragedy of the educated African who goes abroad seeking knowledge and returns to find his country transformed into a place of terror, where the very idealism that drove him away has been weaponised into something monstrous.

Haile Gerima did not flinch from the darkness of the Mengistu era, the Red Terror, the disappearances, the way in which revolutionary rhetoric had curdled into authoritarian nightmare. Nor did he retreat into sentimentality. Teza is a film of extraordinary compassion and equally extraordinary rigour. It won the Special Jury Prize and the Best Screenplay Award at the Venice Film Festival. It won the Golden Tanit and four additional awards at the Carthage Film Festival. It won the Golden Stallion of Yennenga at FESPACO. The world’s cinema community recognised what Ethiopian audiences had perhaps always known: that here was a filmmaker who loved his country enough to tell it the truth.

When he brought Teza to London, I was in the audience again, older now, a consultant and chief editor rather than a young journalist, but feeling once more that particular stillness of being in the presence of authentic work. Gerima had done it again. He had refused to make the comfortable film, the redemptive arc that tidies everything up. He had insisted on the full weight of history, and the audience bore it willingly, because he had earned our trust.

Thirty Years in the Making: Black Lions – Roman Wolves

And now, in February 2026, as the lights of the 76th Berlin International Film Festival fall upon him, Haile Gerima has completed perhaps the most monumental work of his extraordinary life.

Black Lions – Roman Wolves is nearly nine hours long. It took thirty years to make. It is a reckoning, vast, meticulous, and unsparing with Italy’s brutal colonial campaign against Ethiopia. Drawing on archival footage that Italian filmmakers, at Mussolini’s direction, meticulously recorded during the 1935 invasion, and combining it with contemporary interviews with eyewitnesses and descendants of those who fought, Gerima has built an epic from the coloniser’s own images, turning them against the ideology that created them.

The paradox was not lost on him. At the Q&A following the Berlin premiere, he spoke of it with characteristic directness: his people had not filmed. The Italians had. And so he took those images racist in their framing, propagandistic in their intent, and asked a radical question: how can I use the image depicted by the coloniser against itself? The answer, running to nine hours and screened in two parts across consecutive days at the Delphi Filmpalast, is his most sustained and audacious work to date.

He told the packed Berlin audience that he had begun the project in 1996, fed up with what he called the ‘fake history’ of Italy’s Ethiopian campaign the selective memory, the glossing over of mustard gas attacks, of massacres, of the systematic attempt to humiliate and subjugate a proud nation. He had been raised, as he put it, under the miseducation of the British education system that followed the Italian war, and he had never forgotten what that meant: to have the story of your own people’s suffering filtered through the lens of those who had caused it.

He had spent thirty years correcting that record. Thirty years giving the barefoot soldiers of Ethiopia their voices back.

The Berlinale Camera: A Recognition Long Overdue

On 17 February 2026, at four o’clock in the afternoon, in the grand hall of the Delphi Filmpalast, the Berlin International Film Festival presented Haile Gerima with the Berlinale Camera, the festival’s honorary award, given since 1986 to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to cinema and with whom the Berlinale feels a special and enduring connection.

The award itself is a remarkable object: crafted by Düsseldorf goldsmith Georg Hornemann, it is assembled from 128 individual components into the form of a real film camera. It is, in its way, a perfect symbol for what Gerima has built, piece by piece, film by film, year by year, into a body of work that has transformed not merely African cinema, but the global conversation about colonialism, memory, and resistance.

Berlinale Director Tricia Tuttle said it with admirable precision when she announced the award: Gerima’s works bear witness to histories marked by oppression, resistance, and the unfinished work of decolonisation stories that speak with urgent force to the world today. It is an honour to present the Berlinale Camera to a filmmaker who has transformed the way so many understand the world.

For those of us who have followed him for decades who sat in a small London cinema in 1993 and felt something shift inside us this recognition carries a particular weight. Not because we needed the Berlinale’s validation to understand Gerima’s greatness. We never did. But because there is something profoundly moving about watching the world finally, formally, say: yes. We see him. We always should have.

Teacher, Builder, Cultural Keeper

No account of Haile Gerima is complete without speaking of the life he has built beyond the camera. Since 1975, for more than half a century, he has taught film at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he holds the title of Professor Emeritus. He has mentored hundreds of young filmmakers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the African-American diaspora, insisting to each of them that their stories matter, that their voices are necessary, that the industry’s indifference is not a verdict but an invitation to build something better.

With his wife and fellow filmmaker Shirikiana Aina Gerima, he founded Mypheduh Films, a distribution company dedicated to ensuring that independent African cinema reaches audiences without surrendering to the gatekeepers of the mainstream. In 1996, they opened Sankofa Video, Books & Café in Washington a cultural institution offering film screenings, book signings, community discussions, and a physical space for the kind of intellectual life that sustains a people’s sense of themselves. That café has been sustained, in no small part, by the revenue from Gerima’s own films, self-distributed with the same grassroots determination he has brought to every project.

He is not merely a filmmaker. He is an ecosystem of resistance. He built the conditions in which the next generation of African storytellers could imagine themselves.

What He Carried And What He Gave Back

There is a word in the Ghanaian Akan language sankofa that Gerima made the title of his most celebrated film. It means, at its most literal, to go back and retrieve. It is often symbolised by a bird flying forwards whilst its head looks back. It speaks of the necessity of understanding where you have come from in order to know where you are going.

Haile Gerima has lived this word. He left Gondar as a young man, carrying the landscape and the stories of his highland childhood into the lecture halls of Chicago and the film schools of Los Angeles. He carried the memory of his father’s plays into the grammar of his own cinema. He carried the defeats and the dignities of Ethiopian history, the Italian occupation, the Derg’s terror, the Battle of Adwa, into works that ensured that those events would not be forgotten, not be distorted, not be claimed by anyone but those who lived them.

And he gave it all back. Every film is a gift to Ethiopia, to Africa, to the African diaspora, to anyone who has ever had their history stolen and replaced with someone else’s version. Every student he trained is a continuation of this act of giving.

Watching him receive the Berlinale Camera alongside his old comrade Charles Burnett, the two old warriors of the L.A. Rebellion, grey now, unhurried, utterly undiminished felt less like a prize ceremony and more like a moment of profound historical reckoning. The industry that once ignored them was now placing golden cameras in their hands. I suspect Gerima found some quiet satisfaction in that. I suspect he also found it, in some deep part of himself, beside the point. The work was always the point.

Haile Gerima has never simply made films.

He has made memory.

He has made resistance.

He has made truth visible.

And for those of us who first met him in a darkened cinema in London, who felt something change inside us as his images unfolded and his voice filled the room — he has made something rarer still.

He has made pride. Deep, resonant, enduring pride.

May his lens never rest.

Endex, Chief Editor, Ethiopian Tribune

London, 20 February 2026

The Ethiopian Tribune celebrates Ethiopian excellence in arts, culture, politics, and society.

About Post Author

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editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

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By E Frashie Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

Introduction: A Song, A Summit, and Structural Amnesia

In February 2026, at a state dinner in Addis Ababa during the Second Italy-Africa Summit, Ethiopian singers performed “Ma il cielo è sempre più blu” (But the sky is always bluer), a 1975 classic by Italian singer-songwriter Rino Gaetano. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy was captured on camera by the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation smiling, humming along, and applauding the thoughtful musical tribute. The video, titled “Diplomacy in Melody! Meloni Amazed Addis Ababa,” circulated widely as an emblem of cultural exchange and warm bilateral relations.

Yet beneath this surface cordiality lies a profound historical asymmetry. The same Italian state that Meloni represents deployed mustard gas against Ethiopian civilians ninety years earlier, conducted systematic aerial bombardments of villages and infrastructure, and orchestrated the Yekatit 12 massacre in Addis Ababa—one of the most notorious acts of fascist colonial terror in Africa. Italy has never issued a comprehensive formal apology for these crimes, nor has it undertaken a systematic public reckoning with the legacy of its occupation of Ethiopia (1935–1941).

This article situates the Meloni-Abiy diplomatic encounter within the broader historical and structural continuities of Italy-Ethiopia relations. Drawing on the framework of coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000) and post-colonial memory politics (Mbembe, 2001), it examines how unresolved colonial violence intersects with contemporary economic engagement, migration control, and Ethiopia’s internal conflicts. The cheerful performance of an Italian song at a state dinner becomes, in this light, not merely a gesture of hospitality, but a symptom of what might be called structural amnesia, the diplomatic erasure of historical accountability in favour of pragmatic partnership.

I. The Historical Weight: Mustard Gas, Massacre, and the Architecture of Colonial Violence

1.1 Airpower and Chemical Warfare as Strategic Terror

Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935 was not a conventional territorial conquest. It was a laboratory for fascist military modernity, combining mechanised ground forces, aerial bombardment, and most infamously chemical weapons. Between 1935 and 1936, the Regia Aeronautica deployed mustard gas against Ethiopian military formations, civilian settlements, water sources, and livestock (Del Boca, 1991; Baer, 1967). This was not incidental collateral damage; it was systematic use of prohibited weaponry to terrorise, disable, and demoralise.

The effects were catastrophic:

            ∙           Tens of thousands of civilians suffered injuries, including burns, blindness, and respiratory failure.

            ∙           Agricultural infrastructure was destroyed, leading to long-term food insecurity.

            ∙           Psychological trauma permeated collective memory, embedding the Italian occupation as a paradigmatic symbol of racialised violence and technological asymmetry.

Airpower, as scholars of contemporary warfare note (Singer, 2009), functions not only as a tactical instrument but also as a political statement a demonstration of technological superiority designed to undermine the sovereignty and morale of the targeted population. In 1930s Ethiopia, this took the form of what Del Boca (1969) describes as “industrialised mass violence” deployed against a predominantly agrarian society.

1.2 Yekatit 12: The Massacre as Colonial Pedagogy

On February 19, 1937, following an assassination attempt against Italian Viceroy Rodolfo Graziani, fascist forces conducted organised reprisals in Addis Ababa. Over three days, Italian soldiers and civilian collaborators systematically killed thousands of Ethiopians, including intellectuals, clergy, and ordinary residents. Entire neighbourhoods were razed. Religious institutions were targeted. The massacre, known as Yekatit 12 in the Ethiopian calendar, was not reactive mob violence, it was state-directed pedagogy, designed to communicate the consequences of resistance (Campbell, 2017).

The Yekatit 12 massacre is commemorated annually in Ethiopia as Martyrs’ Day. It occupies a place in Ethiopian historical consciousness analogous to other mass atrocities that define national identity and collective trauma. Yet in Italy, the event remains largely absent from public education, political discourse, and diplomatic memory.

1.3 Anthropology as Administrative Weapon

Italian colonial governance relied heavily on ethnographic and anthropological knowledge. Scholars such as Enrico Cerulli produced detailed studies of Oromo, Somali, and other ethnic groups, mapping linguistic, social, and political structures (Sbacchi, 1985). While some of this work had academic merit, it was instrumentalists to justify divide-and-rule strategies administrative partitioning designed to fragment national cohesion and empower intermediary elites loyal to colonial authority.

This echoes broader European colonial practices analysed by Mamdani (1996), who argues that ethnographic classification became a tool of indirect rule, embedding racialised hierarchies into governance structures that outlasted formal colonialism. In Ethiopia, these classifications influenced not only Italian administrative maps but also post-colonial debates about federalism, regional autonomy, and ethnic identity.

II. The Contemporary Landscape: Sovereignty Under Duress and the Continuity of Airpower

2.1 Ethiopian Internal Conflict and Civilian Vulnerability

Ethiopia’s internal conflicts since 2020, including the Tigray, Amhara and Oromo War, have involved extensive use of drones and airstrikes by the federal government. Reports by Amnesty International (2022) and Human Rights Watch (2023) document:

            ∙           Civilian casualties from aerial bombardments.

            ∙           Destruction of infrastructure, including hospitals and schools.

            ∙           Mass displacement, with over two million internally displaced persons and hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing to Sudan and neighboring countries (UN OCHA, 2022).

While the contexts differ markedly from the 1930s, this is not a colonial occupation but an internal federal conflict, the ethical continuity is undeniable: airpower remains a mechanism through which political authority exerts coercive force on civilian populations. The psychological trauma, infrastructural devastation, and displacement mirror, in contemporary form, the consequences of Italy’s aerial campaigns nine decades earlier.

2.2 Sovereignty, Accountability, and the Limits of Developmentalism

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government has framed its military operations as necessary to preserve national unity and territorial integrity. Yet the use of drones supplied by external actors (including Turkey and the UAE) raises questions about sovereignty under duress the extent to which Ethiopia exercises autonomous decision-making amid economic dependency and strategic partnerships with external powers.

This dilemma is not unique to Ethiopia. It reflects a broader post-colonial reality in which African states navigate structural asymmetries inherited from colonialism, including economic dependency, debt burdens, and reliance on foreign military technology. The Mattei Plan, Italy’s investment framework for Africa announced in 2024, exemplifies this tension: it promises infrastructure development and economic partnership while operating within a geopolitical architecture that restricts African mobility, limits fiscal sovereignty, and perpetuates unequal terms of trade.

III. Urban Displacement and the New Colonial Geography: Addis Ababa’s Corridor Development as Gentrification

3.1 The Corridor Development Project: Infrastructure or Exclusion?

Even as Meloni and Abiy exchanged diplomatic pleasantries in February 2026, Addis Ababa was undergoing a dramatic spatial transformation. The Abiy government’s ambitious “corridor development” projects framed officially as infrastructure modernisation and urban renewal have resulted in mass displacement of longtime residents from central and peri-urban neighbourhoods. Tens of thousands of families have been evicted to make way for highway expansions, luxury residential complexes, commercial zones, and landscaped boulevards designed to attract foreign investment and tourism.

Government rhetoric emphasises economic development, job creation, and beautification. Yet critics argue that these projects constitute urban gentrification on a massive scale, creating a new colonial geography in which working-class Ethiopian residents are displaced to make room for European and other foreign investors, expatriate professionals, and wealthy elites (Harvey, 2008; Smith, 1996).

3.2 Historical Echoes: Italian Urban Planning and Contemporary Spatial Violence

The spatial politics of contemporary Addis Ababa bear uncomfortable resemblances to Italian colonial urban planning. During the 1936–1941 occupation, Italian authorities redesigned Addis Ababa according to racialised segregation principles, creating distinct zones for Italian settlers, indigenous elites, and the broader Ethiopian population (Labanca, 2002). Markets, residential areas, and public spaces were reorganized to reflect colonial hierarchies of race, class, and administrative power.

While today’s corridor developments are not explicitly racialised in the colonial sense, the functional logic is analogous: the displacement of poor and working-class Ethiopians to create premium spaces for capital accumulation and elite consumption. The fact that Italian and other European firms are among the primary beneficiaries of construction contracts, real estate investments, and tourism infrastructure compounds the historical irony.

3.3 Displacement Without Compensation: The Human Cost

Investigative reporting and human rights documentation reveal systematic patterns of forced eviction:

            ∙           Residents receive inadequate or no compensation for demolished homes.

            ∙           Alternative housing, when provided, is located on the urban periphery, far from employment opportunities and social networks.

            ∙           Legal recourse is limited; courts frequently rule in favour of government expropriation claims.

            ∙           Community organising and public protest are suppressed through arrests and intimidation.

This constitutes what Saskia Sassen (2014) terms expulsion the violent removal of populations from economic, social, and spatial frameworks to facilitate elite accumulation. In Addis Ababa, expulsion operates through the discourse of development and modernisation, rendering displacement as progress and resistance as obstruction.

3.4 For Whom Is the City Built? The Question of Spatial Justice

The corridor developments raise fundamental questions of spatial justice (Soja, 2010): for whom is the city being built, and who has the right to occupy, shape, and benefit from urban space? When luxury hotels, gated residential compounds, and European-style cafés replace informal settlements and working-class neighborhoods, the city is effectively reoriented away from its existing inhabitants and toward an imagined cosmopolitan elite, both foreign and domestic.

This is not unique to Addis Ababa. Similar dynamics characterise urban transformation across the Global South, from Mumbai to Lagos to Rio de Janeiro. Yet in the Ethiopian context, the displacement occurs in a city that has profound symbolic significance as the site of both anti-colonial resistance (the Battle of Adwa) and colonial atrocity (Yekatit 12). The spatial erasure of working-class Ethiopians to accommodate foreign capital investment becomes, in this light, a continuation of colonial logics by other means.

3.5 The Mattei Plan and Real Estate: Italian Capital Returns to Addis Ababa

Italy’s Mattei Plan, announced in 2024, includes provisions for infrastructure investment, energy projects, and private sector partnerships in Ethiopia. Italian construction firms, real estate developers, and hospitality corporations have expressed significant interest in Addis Ababa’s transformation. Preliminary reports suggest Italian capital is involved in:

            ∙           Construction of mixed-use commercial complexes in redeveloped corridor zones.

            ∙           Partnership agreements with Ethiopian developers for luxury residential projects.

            ∙           Tourism infrastructure, including hotels and restaurants targeting international visitors.

The political optics are striking: ninety years after Italian fascists occupied Addis Ababa, demolished neighbourhoods, and massacred residents, Italian capital returns not through military invasion but through investment frameworks welcomed by an Ethiopian government desperate for foreign currency and development finance. The mechanism has changed; the asymmetry persists.

IV. Migration, Borders, and the Asymmetry of Movement

4.1 The Closure of Europe and the Securitisation of Displacement

Ethiopian refugees fleeing conflict face increasingly restrictive European migration policies. Italy, under Meloni’s government, has intensified:

            ∙           Maritime interceptions in the Mediterranean.

            ∙           Agreements with Libya and Tunisia to prevent irregular crossings.

            ∙           Legislative tightening of asylum procedures, reducing approval rates and extending detention periods (European Council, 2023; Triandafyllidou, 2022).

This policy framework reveals a fundamental asymmetry: European states encourage investment and economic engagement in Africa while simultaneously fortifying borders against African mobility. The structural logic is one of selective permeability capital, commodities, and strategic partnerships cross borders freely, while displaced persons are intercepted, detained, or deported.

4.2 Historical Irony and Moral Incoherence

The irony is historically acute. Italy, which displaced hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians through colonial occupation and continues to evade accountability for war crimes, now restricts entry to Ethiopians fleeing contemporary displacement displacement caused, in part, by conflicts involving weaponry supplied by European and Middle Eastern states, and by urban gentrification projects that benefit European capital.

This is not merely hypocritical; it reflects what Mbembe (2001) calls the necropolitics of contemporary global governance, the differential allocation of life chances, mobility rights, and protection based on racialised hierarchies that echo colonial structures of power.

4.3 Displacement at Home, Exclusion Abroad: The Double Bind

For ordinary Ethiopians, the contemporary reality is a double bind: displaced from their homes in Addis Ababa to make way for foreign-oriented development, they are simultaneously barred from migrating to the European countries whose capital profits from that displacement. They are rendered invisible in their own city and inadmissible to the cities of Europe. This is the spatial and political logic of neo-colonial accumulation: extract value, displace populations, and externalise the consequences.

V. The Meloni-Abiy Encounter: What the Music Conceals

5.1 Cultural Diplomacy as Memory Management

The performance of “Ma il cielo è sempre più blu” at the state dinner was, on its surface, a gesture of hospitality and cultural recognition. Ethiopian hosts honoured their Italian guests with a song from Italy’s own musical heritage. Meloni’s visible delight humanised the diplomatic encounter, generating positive media coverage and reinforcing the narrative of partnership and mutual respect.

Yet cultural diplomacy, particularly between former colonisers and colonised, is never politically neutral. It functions as a form of memory management, a way of foregrounding aesthetic exchange while backgrounding historical violence. The performance of an Italian song in Addis Ababa, in the absence of Italian acknowledgment of mustard gas attacks or the Yekatit 12 massacre, becomes a symbolic displacement a substitution of cultural goodwill for structural accountability.

5.2 The Silence of the Archive

What was not performed at the dinner is as significant as what was. There was no reading of the names of Yekatit 12 victims. No acknowledgment of the villages destroyed by Italian chemical weapons. No mention of the Axum Obelisk, returned in 2005 but still emblematic of decades of Italian refusal to repatriate looted cultural heritage. No reference to the fact that Italy has never paid reparations, issued a comprehensive apology, or integrated its colonial crimes into national education curricula (Labanca, 2002).

Nor was there acknowledgment of the residents being displaced, at that very moment, from neighbourhoods across Addis Ababa some to facilitate corridor developments in which Italian firms hold investment stakes. The state dinner occurred in a sanitised, elite space, hermetically sealed from the realities of both historical and contemporary violence.

This silence is not accidental. It reflects what scholars of post-colonial memory politics call strategic forgetting, the selective construction of historical narratives that emphasise reconciliation and partnership while obscuring the structural legacies of violence and exploitation.

5.3 The Gala as Spatial Performance

The state dinner itself, likely held in a refurbished or newly constructed venue designed to impress international dignitaries, is part of Addis Ababa’s spatial performance of modernity and investment-readiness. The aesthetic choreography of such events (elegant architecture, curated cultural performances, multilingual protocols) serves to project an image of cosmopolitan sophistication that attracts foreign capital and legitimises governance.

Yet this performance is built, quite literally, on the erasure of the city’s working-class residents and the silencing of historical memory. The melody of Rino Gaetano’s song filled a space from which Ethiopians have been systematically excluded both historically through colonial violence and contemporarily through gentrification and displacement.

VI. Ethiopianism and the Politics of Dignity

6.1 Ethiopian Exceptionalism and the Burden of Resistance

Ethiopia’s historical exceptionalism, its successful resistance to colonisation, culminating in the 1896 Battle of Adwa, has long been a source of national pride and Pan-African symbolism. Emperor Haile Selassie’s speech to the League of Nations in 1936, denouncing Italian aggression and appealing to collective security, remains a canonical text in anti-colonial history.

Yet this exceptionalism carries a burden. The expectation that Ethiopia, having resisted full colonisation, should navigate contemporary geopolitics with particular moral authority or strategic autonomy can obscure the structural constraints it faces. Economic dependency, internal conflict, and the pressures of migration management limit Ethiopia’s capacity to exercise sovereignty in the idealised sense.

Ethiopianism, the ideological assertion of Ethiopian sovereignty, dignity, and historical continuity, must therefore be understood not as a static nationalist mythology but as an ongoing political project, constantly negotiated amid internal diversity, regional tensions, and external pressures.

6.2 The Abiy Dilemma: Modernisation, Conflict, and Legitimacy

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s tenure exemplifies this tension. Initially celebrated for liberalising reforms and the 2018 peace agreement with Eritrea (for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize), Abiy’s government has since been implicated in mass atrocities, media repression, and authoritarian consolidation (Human Rights Watch, 2023). The deployment of airpower against Tigray and other regions, combined with the urban displacement of Addis Ababa residents, raises profound questions about the boundaries of legitimate state violence and the moral coherence of a government that simultaneously seeks international investment and domestic coercion.

Abiy’s engagement with Meloni must be read within this context. The Italian partnership offers economic resources and diplomatic legitimacy, but it also implicates Ethiopia in a broader geopolitical architecture that prioritises stability, investment returns, and migration control over human rights, spatial justice, and historical accountability.

6.3 The Critique from Below: Urban Movements and Counter-Narratives

Despite state suppression, resistance to corridor developments persists. Community organisations, displaced residents, and critical intellectuals have articulated counter-narratives that challenge official development discourse:

            ∙           The city belongs to its people, not to capital: Arguments emphasising the right to housing, spatial continuity, and community cohesion.

            ∙           Development for whom?: Questions about the beneficiaries of infrastructure projects and the distribution of costs and benefits.

            ∙           Historical consciousness: Linking contemporary displacement to colonial spatial violence and demanding that Ethiopianism include protection of ordinary Ethiopians, not just symbolic resistance to external domination.

These movements, though fragmented and precarious, represent the possibility of an Ethiopianism from below, one that insists on internal accountability alongside external sovereignty.

VII. Toward a Politics of Accountability: What Reconciliation Would Require

7.1 Beyond Symbolic Gestures

Genuine reconciliation between Italy and Ethiopia would require more than the return of cultural artefacts or state dinners with musical performances. It would necessitate:

            1.         Formal Apology: A comprehensive Italian acknowledgment of mustard gas deployment, the Yekatit 12 massacre, and systematic colonial violence.

            2.         Reparations: Financial compensation for victims’ descendants and funding for Ethiopian institutions dedicated to historical memory and public health.

            3.         Educational Integration: Incorporation of Italian colonial crimes into Italian national curricula, museums, and public discourse.

            4.         Archival Access: Full opening of Italian military and colonial archives to Ethiopian and international researchers.

            5.         Policy Coherence: Alignment of migration policies with ethical commitments to displaced populations, particularly those fleeing conflicts involving European-supplied weaponry or displacement caused by European-backed development projects.

            6.         Investment Transparency: Public disclosure of Italian investment stakes in Addis Ababa corridor developments and mechanisms for ensuring that profits benefit displaced communities.

7.2 Ethiopian Accountability and Internal Governance

Equally important is Ethiopian accountability for contemporary violence and displacement. The federal government’s use of airpower against civilians, detention of journalists, suppression of dissent, and forced eviction of urban residents undermine Ethiopia’s moral authority in demanding accountability from former colonisers. A credible Ethiopianism must integrate internal critique alongside resistance to external domination.

This requires:

            ∙           Independent investigations into civilian casualties from drone strikes.

            ∙           Transitional justice mechanisms for victims of the Tigray War and other conflicts.

            ∙           Halting forced evictions and implementing participatory urban planning that prioritises the housing rights and livelihoods of existing residents.

            ∙           Compensation and rehousing for displaced families, with community oversight of corridor development projects.

            ∙           Constitutional reforms that balance federal authority with regional autonomy and minority rights.

            ∙           Media freedom and civil society space to enable public debate and accountability.

7.3 Spatial Justice as Decolonial Practice

Addressing urban displacement in Addis Ababa requires recognising that spatial justice is inseparable from decolonial politics. If Ethiopianism is to mean more than symbolic sovereignty, it must encompass the right of ordinary Ethiopians to remain in, shape, and benefit from their own capital city. This means:

            ∙           Participatory planning: Involving affected communities in decision-making about urban development.

            ∙           Affordable housing: Ensuring that new construction includes social housing accessible to working-class residents.

            ∙           Economic inclusion: Creating employment opportunities for displaced populations in corridor development projects.

            ∙           Cultural preservation: Protecting historical neighbourhoods and sites of memory from demolition.

VIII. Conclusion: The Sky Is Not Always Bluer And the City Is Not Always Ours

The title of Rino Gaetano’s song, “Ma il cielo è sempre più blu” (But the sky is always bluer), carries a lyrical optimism a promise of continuity, renewal, and hope. Yet for Ethiopians who remember the Italian aircraft that once darkened their skies with mustard gas, and for those now watching bulldozers demolish their homes to make way for foreign investment, the phrase resonates differently. The sky has not always been bluer. It has been a site of terror, displacement, and unacknowledged trauma. And the city Addis Ababa, the site of both Adwa’s pride and Yekatit 12’s sorrow is increasingly not theirs.

The February 2026 diplomatic encounter between Meloni and Abiy, framed by cultural exchange and economic partnership, illustrates the persistence of structural amnesia and spatial violence in contemporary Italy-Ethiopia relations. Investment frameworks, migration restrictions, urban gentrification, and symbolic gestures coexist with the unresolved legacies of colonial violence and the ongoing deployment of coercive force by Italy in the 1930s through airpower and massacre, by Abiy’s government in the 2020s through drones and bulldozers.

Ethiopianism, as a political and ethical project, demands more than the assertion of sovereignty or the celebration of resistance. It requires the integration of historical memory with contemporary accountability, the balancing of external critique with internal governance reform, and the recognition that true partnership cannot be built on the erasure of the past or the displacement of the present.

Until Italy acknowledges the full scope of its colonial crimes, and until Ethiopia confronts the ethical implications of its own use of coercive force, both military and spatial, the music at state dinners will remain what it is: a beautiful melody that conceals an unfinished reckoning. The sky may be bluer in song, but on the ground, the shadows of history remain long, the eviction notices are real, and the work of justice unfinished.

The question is not whether Ethiopians can hum along to an Italian song. The question is whether they will be allowed to remain in their own city, to shape their own future, and to demand accountability, both from former colonisers and from their own government. Until that question is answered affirmatively, in policy and practice, the gala remains a performance of amnesia, and the corridor developments a continuation of colonial geography by other means.

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Ethiopian Tribune editor

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