From Eurocentrism to Ethiocentrism

 Maimire Mennasemay (PhD)

[ Dr. Messay Kebede's thoughtful commentary on Gebrehiwot's major work, Mengistna ye Hizb Astadadar, published on this forum, draws our attention to the deleterious role that "Eurocentrism" has played in modern Ethiopia. This essay links to Messay's concern and considers what kind of perspective could restore to Ethiopians the self-confidence and creativity that have so often marked their history. ]

The ideas and means with which we try to construct Ethiopia's future could exacerbate rather than solve the current problems if these ideas and means do not find resonance in our history, cultures and our long standing aspirations for a just and better life. Our inescapable context is a world dominated by Western civilization, and, in many respects, the experience of the West has become for many of us the norm of economic and political development. But decades of Eurocentric-inspired development, buttressed by Western financial, military, technical and intellectual foreign aid, has left Ethiopians poorer and more miserable than they ever were. Ethiopia is now a foreign aid-addicted country whose status is on the verge of becoming that of a welfare colony of the West. It is thus legitimate to hypothesize that our failure is due primarily to our forgetfulness of the elementary principle that the development of Ethiopia cannot but be the self-development of Ethiopia. But self-development is not attainable if it is not rooted in the mobilization of our own historical, cultural and intellectual resources to understand ourselves and what the West has to offer us. I will call this claim Ethiocentrism.

Before we proceed to the discussion of this issue, it must be noted that the rejection of Eurocentrism and the adoption of Ethiocentrism harbor two dangers that must be averted. The rejection of Eurocentrism must keep clear of the anti-Western and anti-science invective that has unfortunately bedeviled Afrocentrism; and the adoption of Ethiocentrism should not be the occasion for glossing over the injustices that characterize aspects of Ethiopia's history. Ethiocentrism is bound to fail if it is hitched to an antiquarian nationalism that is blind to the cultural, gender, regional and class inequalities. With these two caveats in mind, I would like to provide some justifications for and consider some of the implications of adopting an Ethiocentric perspective.

Though we Ethiopians have escaped, through the victories of our ancestors at Gundat (1875) Gura (1876) Dogali (1887) Adwa (1896), the destructive experience of colonialism suffered by our African brothers and sisters, we share with them the tragic experience of being objectified, observed, described, and analyzed by Westerners working from within their own historical horizon and with which our civilization has not been, and is not as yet, in a dialogical relationship. What is currently available to us is a monological dialogue, that is, a dialogue whose terms of reference and criteria of interpretation are all Western. As a result, though Western academics have studied our cultures and histories extensively, we still are, as St.Augustine, the African bishop, would have put it, a question to ourselves.

The possible answers to who we are and what we are capable of are found in our history, less so in the official versions than in our various social, political, economic and cultural institutions and practices, in our collective memories, and in the unofficial histories and hopes that sustain Ethiopians in their daily struggles for survival. But enucleating the emancipatory meanings of these practices is possible only if we bring them to light thorough our own reflective engagement with our successes, failures and aspirations embedded in our history. Otherwise, our understanding of ourselves and of our society will lack authenticity and fail to translate itself into an active force capable of overcoming our internal and external adversities.

Since the end of World War II, Ethiopia is flooded with foreign consultants, experts and advisors, bringing with them answers to the social, economic and political questions precipitated by our history. The crucial question here is: Has borrowed knowledge - modernization, Marxism, liberalism and ethnic theories - helped us to build an Ethiopia without poverty, disease and oppression? The answer is no; and one important reason for this failure is the Eurocentric theory of historical change that condemns Ethiopia to define its future in terms of the Western experience of social transformation. This has often led us to policies that mimic the West's experience of development in order to solve our problems. But the West itself has not developed by mimicking others; rather it did so through an internal understanding of its conditions and of the adversities it has to overcome.

Westerners gained an internal understanding of themselves through the double process of self-study and the study of others. Given the obviousness of the first, let me deal with the second. The knowledge created by Europeans from studying non-Europeans has deepened their self-understanding by using the "other" as a foil for rediscovering themselves in a new light. Malinowski, the anthropologist, encapsulated this idea when he wrote, "What is the deepest essence in my investigations? To discover what are his [the native's] main passions, the motives for his conduct, his aims…His essential, deepest way of thinking. At this point we are confronted with our own problems: what is essential to ourselves." That is, the knowledge that Westerners produce about us through a comparative method is internal to their activities of self-interpretation. Given then that the knowledge the West produces through the double process of self-study and the study of others is inward looking, Westerners do not experience the knowledge that drives their social practices as something that is alien to their life-world. Rather, this knowledge enriches and drives their societies towards new horizons. Such is not the case with us.

Having abandoned ourselves to the knowledge produced by the West, our fund of self-knowledge is nowhere comparable to that of the West. What the West produces as knowledge about us confronts us externally as knowledge on us, disconnected from our social practices. As a result, we become more and more opaque to ourselves. Trapped in this vortex of loss of meaning and alienation, we witness helplessly our accelerating descent into poverty and oppression, becoming increasingly incomprehensible to ourselves and, indeed, to others. Nor is the comparative dimension available to us as a source of self-understanding insofar as our knowledge of the West is not the result of what we ourselves have discovered about it but rather of what the West has produced as knowledge of itself. We know about the West what the West tells us about itself. This combination of lack of self-knowledge with knowledge of the West that merely repeats what it says about itself has reduced us to being indiscriminating consumers of Western knowledge as ready-made knowledge rather than being creators of emancipatory knowledge.

No wonder then that the Eurocentric theories that animate our revolutions and reforms are disconnected from our history and make us often feel and indeed make us act as if we were aliens to our own culture and society. Such has been the poisoned fruit of Eurocentrism.

This critique of Eurocentrism does not mean that Western reason and science are irrelevant to us. The relativism that considers Western sciences as inherently ethnocentric must be rejected. The issue we face has to do with the way we interact with this knowledge. Rather than critically appropriate Western knowledge through a process that makes it resonate with our history and culture, we abandon ourselves to the historical and social logic of the West. We treat Western reason and science as if they were inert tools to be applied to inert matter, ie., our society, rather than as potential means that have to be actualized through a self-generated understanding of ourselves and of our conditions. This lack of critical appropriation of European knowledge, through our own historically generated self-understanding, blinds us to the potentials that lie within our society, cripples us as historical agents, and prevents us from indigenizing science and technology. Our modern history shows us that borrowed knowledge has not enabled us to build a society of freedom, abundance and justice. It has, on the contrary, inflicted incalculable harm on Ethiopians.

The objections to the demand that we appropriate modern science and technology through the cultural and social logic that informs our history come from development theories, Marxism and liberalism. The core claim of these objections is that traditional values and cultures are incompatible with modernity and must give way to Western values and cultures if Ethiopia is to develop. But modern history refutes this claim. Confucianism, which was once considered a serious obstacle to development, is now touted as one of the important factors that explains the rapid development of East Asian countries. Some important lessons could be derived from the East Asian experience: that, first, non-Western cultures are not necessarily obstacles to social and economic transformations; second, that there are different modernities, each expressing the singularity of a particular society's historical path; third, that there are indeed different routes to modernity; and finally, that modernization does not necessarily mean Westernization.

These lessons, taken together with the failure of Eurocentric approaches to resolve our country's problems, demand that we go beyond a critique of Eurocentrism and develop an Ethiocentric approach for extracting our country from its present predicament. To be Ethiocentric is to recognize, identify and vivify the institutional, cultural, motivational and behavioral practices in our history that carry within themselves the possible paths to freedom, prosperity and social justice; that is, to our own modernity. The possibility of such an indigenous path has already manifested itself in the singular event of Adwa in the sense that our ancestors were able to draw from within their own history, motivational and organizational principles and unifying criteria of identity that enabled them to defeat an European army. What we need to perform is, metaphorically speaking, an intellectual Adwa, that is, critically develop from within our singular history, motivational and organizational principles and unifying criteria of identity to confront our new enemies - ever more dangerous than were the invading Italians - which are abject poverty, pandemics, oppression, and ethnic fragmentation.

In the current circumstances, to trace an Ethiopian path to modernity involves taking possession of the present as a historical moment that embodies the ruins and the unfulfilled aspirations of the past. This means grasping the concrete political, economic and social problems Ethiopians face in their private and public lives from a perspective that discerns in the present conditions why and how the past emancipatory attempts failed and the consequences of these failures. This is a responsibility Ethiocentrism must embrace if it is not to degenerate into an empty rhetoric. Such a perspective will put us face to face, on the one hand, with the necessity of extirpating the inherited internal structures and cultures of political and economic oppression, and, on the other, with the necessity of empowering the peasants and urban working poor, who represent more than 90% of Ethiopians, to define their problems, articulate their aspirations, and control their means of existence.

Ethiocentrism can see what Eurocentrism cannot see - that our past bears within itself the traces, aspirations and potentials of an Ethiopian path to modernity and universality. From the thirteenth century onwards, wars and demographic movements, occasioned by the Oromo-Amhara encounter, initiated a process of state-building that by the time of Emperor Menelik II culminated in the crucial shift from primary (ethnic) to secondary or universal (Ethiopian) identification. Indices of this internally generated path to modernity and universality are the emergence of individualization, expressed in new political concepts such as "mebt" (individual right), "gel" (private as opposed to public), and the birth of a new political culture that set in motion the transformation of a closed and territorial ethnic identity into an open and non-territorial ethnicity that opened up the whole Ethiopian space to all ethnicities.

It is when we started looking at ourselves in the mirror of Western history that we jumped to re-describing ourselves as a backward people in need of Western remedies and embraced indiscriminately Eurocentric ideas that finally culminated in the anti-Ethiopian frenzy of the Derg that left the country in ruins. The atrocities of the Derg did not however open our eyes to the dangers of Eurocentrism. On the contrary, the EPRDF's drive to ethnicize Ethiopia and hoist secessionism as a constitutional principle is the outcome of the interpretation of the history of Ethiopian state-building through the distorting lenses of European colonial history and theory.

That state-building in Ethiopia was a process soaked in violence and oppression is what Ethiocentrism brings out to light, forcing us to recognize that Ethiopian modernity cannot be achieved if it is dissociated from the institutionalization of freedom and social justice. But this history of state-building cannot in any way justify turning back the historical clock to an era when ethnicity was a total political identity confined to a given territory.

It is obvious that a people-oriented and task-based understanding of Ethiocentrism cannot but be a positive opening to the world. Though it will not use Western history as a mediating term for Ethiopian self-understanding, it will still be open to the contingency of our history. At the same, the logic of its recognition of the singularity of Ethiopian history makes it recognize the singularity of the history of others. Such a stance makes it natural for Ethiopia and other nations to interact on an equal footing and to critically re-appropriate each other's contribution to human civilization. Consequently, contrary to the empty and crippling universalism of the Eurocentric approach that makes Ethiopia just a retarded moment in the stream of Western civilization, condemned to mimic the ways of the West, Ethiocentrism will give us the concrete self-confidence and the vision we need to re-appropriate Western sciences and technologies on our own terms.

(Sorce : Ehiomedia)