Mereja Forum

[Naga Tuma]

In my view, there exist parallel narratives of the long-established Ethiopian ethos. If I have been hearing them incorrectly, I stand to be corrected.

There are plenty of sources about what I understand to be the long-established narrative.

Let us start with a reflection of it by the late Laureate Tsegaye Ghebremedhin back in 1998. He stated: "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. The cradle of man is here, the beginning of man is here, there is no refuting that."

The second reflection was an unwitting short statement by Dr. Gemechu Megersa during an interview that was posted online: ነመ ጄዹ። It means they say human.

I will leave it to the students and researchers of anthropology to understand more deeply what the words ነመ, name, and human may have in common.

If my reading serves me well, I know for sure that both Laureate Tsegaye Ghebremedhin and Dr. Gemechu Megersa have gone to Borana and have tried to understand the ethos of the Borana community of Ethiopia and Africa.

If this is arguably so, it means that the reflections of both of them are credible bridges to the established Ethiopian ethos since ancient times.

That is not all. As ambitious of an authority that he may have wished to become when the world was in a different era of competitions for influence, one of Ethiopia's Atses renamed himself ዓለምሰገድ nearly five centuries ago. It roughly means to whom the world bows.

So, as ambitious as his name was for his era, one thing sounds to be sure. It is reflective of the established Ethiopian ethos since ancient times that wasn't limited to the continent of Africa in terms of standing as a leader of one country in the world.

Nearly a century ago, another Ethiopian leader, Atse Haile Selassie, managed to make Ethiopia a member state of the first global political organization, the League of Nations. In his speech in 1936, he stated that there was "no precedent for a Head of State himself speaking" before the assembly of that League. In his speech, he argued for the moral imperative to upholding international treaties on a global scale. Nowhere in that speech could I read a reflection that limited this moral imperative to a continent or any continent of the world.

In my thinking, the reflections of these two Ethiopian leaders and two Ethiopian scholars of history can be exemplary for the long-established Ethiopian ethos. There are plenty more to mention.

The parallel narrative that appears to be emerging lately sounds to me as if it is imperative that we Ethiopians need to struggle for the rights of Black people and against the exploitation of Africa by global powers that are external to Africa.

As much as this emerging parallel narrative sounds reasonable and the call sounds imperative, it sounds to suppress that established Ethiopian ethos since ancient times.

No doubt that the state of affairs for Africans since the widespread institutionalization of slavery and colonization of much of Africa needed attention and fervent resistance.

In my view, that attention was paid and fervent resistance was made starting a long time ago by many leaders, including Atse Haile Selassie. I do not think that there can be any relitigating of the successful formation of the Organization of African Unity over half a century ago. If anything, there is definitely a lot of room to relitigate the radical change that befell Ethiopia less than a decade later without filtering at Africa's shores the advantages and disadvantages of the rai·son d'ê·tre of that change, the device of which was born outside Africa.

That attention was also paid and fervent resistance was also made by the African American martyr the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who more than half a century ago taught the world to where the trajectory of the compass of the moral universe leads as well as how content matters over color.

Of course, teaching theories are not practices. If theories were practices, Atse Haile Selassie's theoretical speech in 1936 at the League of Nations would have done it. Then again, there is no right practice that is not based on the right theory. Most definitely, the practice of the lunatic bunch that has reduced itself into a paragon of pathology for eternity is not based on the right theory.

It is one thing to make the attentions paid and the fervent resistances made more effective as time goes on instead of seeing them stagnate. Relitigating them is another thing.

The late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s teaching of how content matters over color can be taught on a broader scale, from pitch melanin to albino white, from Madagascar to Siberia, and from the far east to the far west. We can speak for Africans not because we are Black but because we have rights at par with any color on any continent of this world, which in turn is at par with the long-established Ethiopian ethos.

What is more? It has been my understanding that there are plenty of individual Ethiopians that have already been at home on about every continent and gave birth to children on those continents that ought to be measured by the content of their characters on all those continents.

These are why I think that it is necessary to uplift the suppressed Ethiopian ethos that was established in ancient times.