Rudolf Agstner (Hrsg.): Arbeiten und Leben am Hof Haile Selassies I. Lore Trenkler: Erinnerungen 1960-1975

  Review  

In memoriam Ryszard Kapuściński

Obituary 

Frederic A. Sharf (ed.): Letters from Abyssinia 1916 and 1917: with supplemental Foreign Office Documents

   Review  

Anthony Mockler: Haile Selassie’s War

  Review 

Creating modern Ethiopian historiography (Ethiopian sources from the early 20th Century)

Researchers interested in the history of Africa perceive Ethiopia as such a culturally different area, they exclude it from their fields of interest. Moreover, both the beginning and the development of Ethiopian studies was derived from and used to be tightly connected to Semitic studies. To prove the point one may argue that research of Ethiopian history entails the application of methods different from those used for researching the history of other areas of Sub-Saharan Africa. The reason for this is a strong connection between Ethiopia and the Red Sea and the Arabian Peninsula areas. Ethiopian culture, rather than by African influences, was shaped by the two great monotheistic religions which came to the Hom of Africa at the very early stages of their existence, i.e. Christianity and Islam. Christianity was introduced as a state religion during the Aksumite Empire in the 4th century, while Islam came to the Abyssinian Highlands as early as the 7th century. The Ethiopian centuries-old tradition of writing, which is not typical for Sub-Saharan Africa, is a consequence of remaining under the influence of Semitic, as well as Eastern Christianity cultures. This resulted in a vast store of written sources, some of them over two thousand years old. Aside from their quantity, they attract academic interest due to their high literary value

Refashioning the Ethiopian monarchy in the twentieth century: An intellectual history

This article traces the shift in the Ethiopian monarchical ideology from lineage as symbolic Christian filiation to dynasty as a political genealogy of sovereign power. From the end of the nineteenth century, and more prominently under Haylä Səllase, Ethiopian state sources started qualifying the Ethiopian ruling dynasty as ‘unbroken’ in history. A record of ‘uninterrupted’ power allowed the Ethiopian government to politically appropriate past glories and claim them as ‘ours’, thus compensating for the political weakness of the present with the political greatness of the past. The ideological rebranding of the Ethiopian monarchy in the 1930s brought Ethiopia closer to Japan, and the ‘eternalist clause’ of the Meiji constitution offered a powerful model of how to recodify dynasty in modern legal terms. An intellectual history of dynasty in the Ethiopian context sees the concept simultaneously associated with both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic political projects. The narratives of continuity enabled by the dynastisation of history were successful in invigorating the pro-Ethiopian front during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1936-1941), but served at the same time to reinforce domestic mechanisms of class, political and cultural domination

Paintings in St. George Church in Addis Ababa as a method of transmitting information about history and power in 20th century Ethiopia

In one of the most important churches in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) there is a panel containing several paintings. Part of the paintings represent scenes from the lives of saints, while exact copies of photographs showing Emperor Haile Sillasie during the war against Italy (1935–1941) constitute another part. The subject of the paintings, as well as the form, are deeply rooted in the tradition of Ethiopian church paintings. At the same time, both the subject and the form reveal several modern influences. The paintings were copied from frequently published, and thus well-known, photographs. This fact stresses the importance of the scenes chosen to be represented on the church walls. The panel from St. George Church serves as a good example of methods used in Ethiopia under Haile Sillasie to transmit a message about power and history, and to present the intended picture of the Emperor

Susanne Epple (ed.), The state of status groups in Ethiopia: Minorities between marginalization and integration, Studien zur Kulturkunde 132, Berlin: Reimer 2018, 283 pp. (a review of thwe book)

A review of the book by Susanne Epple (ed.), "The state of status groups in Ethiopia: Minorities between marginalization and integration"