Isn’t it wonderful that everything you want to know is on the internet now? Just surf Wikipedia and Google topics to your heart’s content. It’s always worked in the past, and if I want to dig a bit deeper, there is usually an obvious list of books to grab on Amazon, just a click away. This year, for the first time, that strategy completely failed me.
In my efforts to learn a lot more about Ethiopia I discovered the net to be shallow waters. I finally had to face the fact that most of the stuff I wanted to know simply does not exist online in any form. So I started casting about for travelogues and other books about the country. By the third one, I was throwing it across the room in disgust. They all contained the same touristy information. They all talked about how neat the rock-hewn churches at Lalibela were and made passing high-minded comments about the poverty or recounted the same miniature history lesson about the birth of coffee. Yawn. And so I’ve had to get off my butt and track down some much more raw sources. I ordered several obscure scholarly works and dissertations from the interlibrary loan office. I emailed several people living in Addis Ababa in hopes that they could give me the real skinny on the current state of the religion, language, and culture. It’s been hard digging through these books from university professors of “African Studies”. There really IS interesting information in all of them I’ve waded through so far, but it’s buried amidst the rubble that often passes for ivory tower research. Some writers try to keep their own opinions out of their text as much as possible. Others just can’t help it. One such recent case was a study of the daily lives of school-age children in the capital by Swedish scholar Eva Poluha. Though the book contained some gems, passages like the following one really drove me nuts.
First of all, the [children I interviewed] took it for granted that everybody had a religion. In one of the interviews 12 year old Judith asked me ‘Excuse me, please eva, but what is your religion?’ I told her that actually I had been baptized a Christian but that I no longer believed in any of the religious systems. I had seen so many people commit harmful acts towards their fellow human beings and yet, they not only called themselves but were also thought of by others, as being very religious. So I said, “I respect those who in their acts show respect for other people, what they say is less important”. Both Judith and her friends Rebqa (12) and Manassebesh (10) were shocked Not so much at what I had said about respect for others in your deeds, as at my no longer believing in any religion. ‘But Eva, you must have a religion’, all three of them told me together. ‘If you have no religion you dont have friends’, said Rebqa. ‘You won’t know how to behave’, said Manassebesh. ‘Many people will come and try to forcefully pull you into their religion’, said Judith. I tried to calm them, saying that I had lived like this for many decades without problems. They did not look convinced however.
-Eva Poluha, The Power of Continuity: Ethiopia through the eyes of its children, p.160
This is so rich. The author believes she has no religion – she is so high above that nonsense. But her religion is clearly secularism – man in conglomeration is deity and the credentialed scientists are the priesthood. The young girls are right to say “You must have a religion!”. It’s right in front of everyone’s own face. The Ethiopian children were worried that people would try to force a woman with no religion into their own. This won’t happen though since the author already DOES have a religion. In fact, throughout the book I find the author frequently proselytizing for her own godless western materialism. In another section of the book where she is interviewing teenage girls about sex and abortion, she constantly reassures them that abortions are safe medical procedures. The girls are skeptical. They are convinced they are dangerous. The author shakes her head at their backwardness. In several other cases, she tries (usually in vain) to inject some modern feminist ideas into their dialogue. In trying to stir them up about the fact that men don’t typically have to help with the household chores, the girls reply with something like, “Why would I want a man to help in the kitchen? He would ruin the stew!”
The authors point throughout the book is that the culture of submission to hierarchy throughout the centuries has allowed the Ethiopian people to be serially abused by their rulers. She talks about how the reign of the emperors was not so different than that of the communists in the 1970s and that the new (technically democratic) government of the last twenty years isn’t that different either. I have to agree with most of these points. The new guys in charge look a heck a lot like the old guys in charge.
The emperors forcibly moved people off their ancestral land to prop up the wealth of the elite families. The communists forcibly moved people off their ancestral land to build communal farms. The current government forcibly moves people off their ancestral land to rent it to the Saudis. Is anything REALLY that different? Some, but not near enough to make any outside observer (short of bankers) happy. The difference is that I think many of the cultural and religious heritage that ties the people together is mostly a GOOD thing. I am not in favor of dissolving them in favor of radical individualism. The author thinks if we could inject a bunch of this “fight for my rights!” ethos into the country, everything would get a lot better. I’m not so sure. I think it would probably just get a lot bloodier. I think a reformation within the church would ultimately ease the oppression of the people from the inside out while maintaining the best existing aspects of their culture. That’s a hard sell though and can only be observed over generations. Tons of development money from the Saudis and the Chinese will seem to make a great improvement in general welfare in the short-term, but it cannot save anyone.