‘Are you Oromo First or Ethiopian First?’
By Awol Allo |The Glasgow Legal Theory
July 19, 2013 (The Gulele Post) — That was the question put to Jawar
Mohamed by Al Jazeera’s The Stream co-host Femi Oki. Jawar’s response—‘
I am an Oromo first’,
and that ‘Ethiopia is imposed on me’—raised a political tsunami that
provides us with a unique and revealing insight into the moral
parochialism and ethical deadlock that pervades our political
imagination. Many moved too quick and jumped too fast- seeking to
obliterate the political stature of the man they lauded as ‘progressive’
and ‘visionary’ not long ago. Their love affair with Jawar came to a
sudden halt with his declaration of loyalty to his ethnic subjectivity,
as opposed to his Ethiopian subjectivity. Their objection was not merely
against Jawar’s specific claims but a concern with why the ‘Oromo’
question, and why at this time.
As I tried to understand the modes of reasoning, forms of rationality
and kinds of logic that permeated the political earthquake that
followed, I am reminded of my own politics of location. How should I
interpret these multi-polar exchanges that seem to traverse the spheres
of politics, affect, thought and reflection? How can I avoid playing
into the existing political fault lines- the politically disarming
essentialism of
Ethiopiawinet and the hyper-coding of
ethno-nationalism? I have no answer to these questions except to say
that there is no position of neutrality, an outside from which one can
speak an objective truth in any discussion of issues so fraught with
contingencies and complexities. In what follows, I will only address the
debate that pertains to this specific question of what one is in and of
himself and how that question is deeply tied to power, force, and
right.
Let me begin with the notion of
Ethiopiawinet—a
master-signifier central to the political storm. What does it signify
and how did it come to have the kind of political reality that it has?
Allow me to take a bit of a detour here to establish my point. In his
‘history of the present’, Michel Foucault says this about history:
“history had never been anything more than the history of power as told
by power itself, or the history of power that power had made people
tell: it was the history of power, as recounted by power.” History as an
index of power, and as an operator and reinvigoration of the hegemony
of a particular group! I think those who met Jawar’s response with such
utter surprise and outrage are those dazzled by this magical function of
history. This history weaves the heterogeneity, indefiniteness, and
complexity of the country’s past into a coherent narration. Key events
and moments in the nation’s history—stories of origin, war, victory,
conquest, occupation, pillage, dispossessions, marginalization,
etc—becomes discursive formations tied to power, force, and law. These
dissymmetries were coded and inscribed into juridical codes, laws, and
institutions- providing
Ethiopiawinet the kind of truth that it now has.
Disregarding the vulgarity that has been so ubiquitous, even the most
sophisticated of replies take a similar and predictable pattern:
Ethiopiawinet is
a kind of reality with a deeper meaning and therefore goes without
saying. In a short genealogical excavation of Ethiopia’s essentialist
historiography, Semir Yusuf
offers a
trenchant critique of the mainstream history of modern Ethiopia. He
provides an interesting insight not into the truth of history but the
formation of truths and the system of meaning they constitute and
circulate. They overlook the ritual inherent to that concept, the
deployments made of it, the reappropriation to which it is subject, the
erasures it inflicts, and the claims it seals and keeps inaccessible. I
suggest that we conceive Ethiopia as a creation of a grand historical
narrative and
Ethiopiawinet as an ideology. Ethiopia, like the
United States, Great Britain, France, Kenya, or any nation for that
matter, has crafted beautiful lies of its own aimed at creating a
‘historical knowledge’ that serves as a weapon of power. Ethiopiawinet,
like American-ness, British-ness, Scottish-ness, and
Oromumma is
an ideological construct. Both as an imaginary and symbolic form, it has
no preemptory force that gives claim to truth and rationality.
In Ethiopia, however, historical knowledge was installed in a rather
invasive way, in a totalized and totalizing way, eliminating every form
of counter-narrative from circulating in the social body. Because of
this exclusive access to narrative production,
Ethiopiawinet has
come to inscribe itself not only in the ‘nervous system’ of its subjects
but also in the temperament, making people believe that there is a
hidden truth to this beautiful lies and myths. As a result,
Ethiopiawinet became
a ‘master signifier’, as psychoanalysts would say, and came to signify
something pure and superior. For those who embraced the category
without questioning its constitutive logic, it is a fixed, stable, and
preemptory category that signifies something divine and adulterated. It
is perceived as something absolute, eternal, and immutable, an
ontological form that has its own intrinsic reality. I think it is
precisely this ontologization of an ideological category that explains
the fury of Ethiopianists. They don’t recognize that the truth of
Ethiopiawinet is a making of our own, that is not independent of social
system and power relations. In their refusal to recognize the right of
an Oromo to give an account of himself in his own terms and the
unassailable sense of correctness that accompanies this refusal explains
just how embedded and symbolic this ideology is.
For others, it is a depoliticizing category that mutes differing
articulations of identity, commits historical injustice, and conceals
the battle cries that can be heard beneath the rhetoric of national
unity. By muting an expression of loyalty with the subject positions
that power uses but deliberately and systematically misrecognizes, the
dominant articulation of
Ethiopiawinet depoliticizes other
identity categories. By depoliticizing it, it silently erases the
injustices it perpetrated against these subjectivities. By refusing to
embrace this type of
Ethiopiawinet, by proclaiming his loyalty to
Oromumma, Jawar is attacking the hinge that connects ‘historical knowledge’ of
Ethiopiawinet to power. It is not a denial of his Ethiopian identity but a displacement, and an attack on an exclusionary conception of
Ethiopiawinet that
is deployed as a weapon in political struggles, and one that does not
recognize the right of people to be called by a name of their choosing.
If there is any right of people, it is the right to be called and
identified with the name they want. The refusal of Ethiopianists to
recognize the voices of others reveals a play of power at work in every
invocation of this concept.
The Personal is the Political
True, every nation weaves together its own necessary myths to keep
the social fabric and its ideological edifice together. But these
ritualized myths that glorify the uninterrupted and untarnished glory of
the nation should not annihilate the political agency of those who
occupy this subject position.
Oromumma is not a necessary
biological category. It is a political category. It is a subject
position and an identity category. Those who embody the material and
lived experience of being an Oromo are political subjectivities with
unique and different experience of their own. They were treated with
contempt and indifference because they spoke their language. Their
dignity and humanity has been reduced because they asserted their
identity. For those who endured the every day gestures of humiliation
and coded dehumanization, the personal is the political. They become
subjects of resistance when their identity is frustrated, demeaned, when
my identity, so to speak, fails as a result of a wider systemic
failures. It is when the individual links his failure with systemic
failure, his with the universal, rather than the personal inadequacy;
that the stranger in him emerges. This is precisely what Jawar meant
when he
said, ‘because we are forced to denounce our identity, we ended up reaffirming and reasserting our identity’.
The words of Steve Biko are poignant reminders: When Steve Biko says,
“Merely by describing yourself as black you have started on a road
towards emancipation, you have committed yourself to fight against all
forces that seek to use your blackness as a stamp that marks you out as a
subservient being”, he is trying to politicize blackness. He is trying
to destabilize the naturalized nexus between blackness and subservience.
Those whose sense of worth questioned, whose dignity squashed, and
humanity contested because of their subjectivity will have a different
narrative of who we are as a society. Surely, the rage in Jawar’s head,
the fire in his belly and the energy with which he sought to reassert
his dignity and worth as an equal speaking being represents a redemptive
quest for the recognition of his subjectivity and his claims as a
discourse worthy of voice and visibility.
In politics, what is not said is more important than what is said in
public. I personally do not need a lecture by a mathematician or for
that matter a historian that these things happen in Ethiopia. I do not
need anyone to tell me that they never occurred. I have seen people
argue in meetings that other languages should not be spoken in public
places such as universities. I have seen students in academic
institution frown upon students who chose to speak in Afan Oromo; I have
heard religious figures claim that it is a curse to preach in Afan
Oromo. I have seen people pause with astonishment when someone fails to
fit their caricatured image of an Ethiopian. And we have all seen the
hostile turn around in Taxis whenever a different language other than
Amharic is spoken. I know many of you will dismiss this as ‘inferiority
complex’—but these are the embodied experiences of a subject that no
ideology or vilification can displace. What was evident from the events
of the last few weeks was that the hubris of
Ethiopiawinet does
not and cannot recognize other subject positions unless they speak from
within its discourses and frameworks. Whatever the latter says, the
former hears it as a noise, not as discourse.
Hegemony is a form of political theology
. The hegemonic groups
see his hegemonic position as a bestowment. They demand that the
oppressed and excluded makes use of the very vocabularies, analytic
categories, archives, histories, discourses and standards used by the
oppressor when articulating their grievances. It demands that the
oppressed and the excluded renounce its claims to past injustices for a
reconciled future without saying the terms of that reconciliation. That
kind of
Ethiopiawinet can no longer go without saying. We need a new beginning, a new concept of
Ethiopiawinet that
embodies and celebrates diversity and listens to all its voices. We
need an Ethiopia of all its people can walk tall assured of its dignity
and worth. This subconscious hegemony that compels us from within to
squash the dignity of those who refuse to use a partisan and
exclusionary discourse is no way to get to that free and democratic
Ethiopia.
–
The Gulele Post
