Ethiopia Does Not Need a Golden Past – It Needs an Honest Future

Public argument in Ethiopia has a habit of reducing history to moral theatre. Individuals are cast as either saviours or destroyers; whole eras are remembered as either glory or ruin. The dispute over Menelik II is the clearest example. For some, he stands as the architect of a modern state; for others, as the author of conquest and dispossession. Neither verdict, on its own, is adequate to the historical record, and neither is sufficient to the political work that confronts the country now. Menelik was a ruler of the late nineteenth century, formed by a political world in which empire, […]
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