A Short History of Ethiopia Frome Acient Times to the Moderan Era

The factors that determine the politics of modern African states are for the most part very complicated. The relatively “young age” of most of these states as sovereign independent states, at times, results in difficulties with building up the traditions of a firmly established pattern of interests behind their policies.

Dr. John Okumu argues that the most important factor determining the politics of African states is their colonial history and heritage, for the colonial period left behind it on independence, some tangible and intangible links with the metropolitan powers, and with countries formerly under the same colonial powers. The most important of these are common languages, currency zones, and common administrative, educational, and legal systems. Other intangible links include such things as informal personal links between African politicians and businessmen and those of the metropolitan powers, and other former colonies ruled by the same colonial masters.

The above can be said to relate to most African countries except for modern Ethiopia, which is Africa’s oldest independent country with an almost unbroken history going back to about 1000 B.C. (with the exception of a five-year occupation by Mussolini’s Italy, Ethiopia has never been colonized). This is the result of interaction among peoples in and around the Horn of Africa for thousands of years. From the earliest times, these groups combined to produce a culture that at any given time, differed markedly from that of surrounding peoples. The evolution of this early “Ethiopian” culture was brought about by an amalgam of ethnic, linguistic and religious groups consisting of both indigenous Cushitic and foreign elements from Arabian Peninsula.

The migration of Semitic ethnic groups from Southwest Arabia had significant influences on the formation and evolution of culture in northern Ethiopia. These groups arrived during the first millennium B.C. and brought Semitic speech, writing and a characteristic stone-building tradition and techniques to northern Ethiopia. They seem to have contributed directly to the rise of the Aksumite kingdom, a trading state that prospered in the first centuries of the Christian era and united the shores of the southern Red Sea commercially and at times politically. It was an Aksumite king who converted to Christianity in the mid-fourth century, a religion that passed on to their successors along with their concept of a centralized state and practice of empire building.

The establishment, which grew to be the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, became a major actor in Ethiopian politics as well as a critical factor that shaped Ethiopian culture and Identity. The spread of Islam to the coastal areas of the Horn of Africa in the eighth century, however, led to the isolation of the highlands from European and Middle Eastern centers of Christendom. The emergence of this new proselytizing religion and its aggressive proliferation in the horn of Africa was partly responsible for what became a long-term rivalry between Christians and Muslims—a rivalry that exacerbated older tensions between highlanders and lowlanders and agriculturalists and nomads that have persisted to the present day.4 Eritrean separatism is a good case in point. It originated as an expression of radical Muslim resentment of Christian highlander domination—within Eritrea as well as from Addis Ababa.

In the post-Aksumite period, both Kingship and Orthodoxy, which had their roots in Aksum and had became the dominant institutions, retained their central position among the northern Ethiopians. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a dynasty known as the Zagwe ruled from their capital in the northern highlands. The Zagwe period is distinctive with one of the most artistically creative phases in Ethiopian history, involving, among other things, the carving of a large number of rock-hewn churches and building the impressive monastic complexes.

The Zagwe heartland was well south of the old Aksumite sphere of influence and the Zagwe interlude was but one stage in the continuing southward shift of the trajectory of political power. After the mid-thirteenth century, the successors of the Zagwe —the members of the so-called “Solomonic” dynasty — positioned themselves in the central highlands and directed their attention still farther south and east, having intervened heavily in the affairs of neighboring peoples.

In these quarters, the “Christian kingdom of Ethiopia,” a conglomerate of the two dominant peoples—the Amhara of the central highlands and the Tigray of the northern highlands—confronted the growing power and confidence of Muslim peoples who lived between the eastern edge of the highlands and the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Collision with this new adversary and its consequences were destined to persist for a long time to come and challenge the Ethiopian state and at times even pose mortal danger to its very existence. In religious and ethnic conflicts that reached their climax in the mid-sixteenth century, the Amhara and Tigray turned back tidal waves of determined Muslim advance with Portuguese assistance, but only after the northern highlands had been overrun and devastated. The arrival of the Portuguese in the region can be viewed as a watershed in

Ethiopia’s history of the extensive period of isolation from the rest of Christendom that had been near total, except for contact with the Coptic Church of Egypt. However, the Portuguese advent symbolized the double-edged sword, for with them they brought their religion—Roman Catholicism. Throughout the early seventeenth century, Jesuits and other Catholic orders, which were channeled into the country by Portuguese, sought to impose Catholicism on Ethiopia to the detriment of Orthodoxy. This endeavor caused Ethiopia to spiral down into civil unrest and in time sunk the country into civil war that eventually led to the expulsion of the Catholics from the kingdom.

The Oromo people of southwestern Ethiopia, by the mid-sixteenth century, had begun protracted cycles of migrations during which they overwhelmed the Muslim states to the east and began settling in the central highlands. A profound consequence of this expansion of Oromo settlements over a large area became a reason for the fusion of their culture in some areas with that of the, up to this time, dominant Amhara and Tigray.

The period of trials that resulted from the Muslim invasions, the Oromo migrations and the challenge of Roman Catholicism had drawn to a close by the middle of the seventeenth century. During the next two-and-one-half centuries, a reinvigorated Ethiopian state slowly reconsolidated its control over the northern highlands and eventually resumed expansion to the south, this time into lands occupied by the Oromo.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the Ethiopian state under Emperor Tewodoros II (1855-68) found itself beset by a number of problems, many stemming from the expansion of European influence in northern Africa. Ethiopia survived its first encounter with European imperialism in 1868. One of the least remembered but perhaps the most difficult and costly of military undertakings by the British colonial forces—the Napier Expedition—took place in 1868. The expedition, however, fell short of achieving any imperialist designs in the country due to the unexpected suicide of Emperor Tewodoros II. Ethiopian history might have been written differently today had the British taken the Emperor alive.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, particularly since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 which made the Horn of Africa easily accessible for the European powers competing in the carving up of African continent, Ethiopia’s contacts with the outside world had grown greatly. Especially, after purchase of an aria of the port of Aseb for trading purposes by Italian company, Ethiopia’s wish to maintain its cultural identity and political independence became more serious and complex. By the early 1900’s Italian, French and British colonial agents had begun encroaching into the interior of the Horn of Africa. Italy, in particular, posed the greatest threat, having begun to colonize part of what would become its future colony of Eritrea in the mid-1880s. Ethiopia successfully resisted assaults by the Ottomans of Egypt, by Dervishes of the Sudan, and by the Italians who were inundating her Red Sea coastlines.

Ethiopia’s struggle for independence climaxed in the battle of Adowa in 1896 where she vindicated herself by beating Italy and nullifying Italian claims of paper colonialism over her. By so doing, Ethiopia had distinguished herself as the only African nation to defeat an Imperial power and contain the forward progress of the colonial powers on the Horn—Britain, France, and Italy—by signing boundary treaties.11 In the intervening time, Tewodoros’ successors, Yohannis IV (1872-89) and Menelik II (1889-1913), notwithstanding enormous external pressure, fended off local enemies and further expanded and consolidated the state.

Ethiopia was ruled by the Emperor Haile Selassie for most of the twentieth century until 1974 except for the brief period of Italian occupation. The country had a little of the apparatus of a modern state, and the extent of the emperor’s authority varied both in time and place. It had been obvious for some time before 1974 that change was inevitable, but the condition of the country and Haile Selassie’s reluctance to make sweeping changes in the last years of his reign made it difficult to predict its nature.

Behind the façade of the legendary Ethiopia, all was not well. The majority of the population lived by subsistence agriculture under a complicated system of land tenure much similar to the feudal practices of the medieval era. Moreover, the later years of Haile Selassie’s rule saw a growing insurgency in Eritrea, which had been federated with, and eventually annexed by the Ethiopian government following World War II. This insurgency, along with other internal pressures, including severe famine, placed strains on Ethiopian society that contributed in large part to the 1974 military rebellion that ended the Haile Selassie regime and, and along with it, thousands of years of imperial rule.

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