Modernist Art in Ethiopia 2018045761, 9780821423462, 9780821423479, 9780821446539

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Modernist Art in Ethiopia

n ew a f r i c a n h i sto r i e s S e r i e s e d i t o r s : J e a n A l l m a n , A l l e n Is a a c m a n , and Derek R. Peterson

David William Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, The Risks of Knowledge Belinda Bozzoli, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid Gary Kynoch, We Are Fighting the World Stephanie Newell, The Forger’s Tale Jacob A. Tropp, Natures of Colonial Change Jan Bender Shetler, Imagining Serengeti Cheikh Anta Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad Marc Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa?  Marissa J. Moorman, Intonations Karen E. Flint, Healing Traditions Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola, editors, Recasting the Past Moses E. Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown Emily S. Burrill, Richard L. Roberts, and Elizabeth Thornberry, editors, Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa

Matthew M. Heaton, Black Skin, White Coats Meredith Terretta, Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence Paolo Israel, In Step with the Times Michelle R. Moyd, Violent Intermediaries Abosede A. George, Making Modern Girls Alicia C. Decker, In Idi Amin’s Shadow Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Conjugal Rights Shobana Shankar, Who Shall Enter Paradise?  Emily S. Burrill, States of Marriage Todd Cleveland, Diamonds in the Rough Carina E. Ray, Crossing the Color Line Sarah Van Beurden, Authentically African Giacomo Macola, The Gun in Central Africa Lynn Schler, Nation on Board Julie MacArthur, Cartography and the Political Imagination

Daniel R. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets

Abou B. Bamba, African Miracle, African Mirage

Emily Lynn Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here

Daniel Magaziner, The Art of Life in South Africa

Robert Trent Vinson, The Americans Are Coming! 

Paul Ocobock, An Uncertain Age

James R. Brennan, Taifa Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts, editors, Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake

Keren Weitzberg, We Do Not Have Borders Nuno Domingos, Football and Colonialism Jeffrey S. Ahlman, Living with Nkrumahism

David M. Gordon, Invisible Agents

Bianca Murillo, Market Encounters

Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman, Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development

Jon Soske, Internal Frontiers

Stephanie Newell, The Power to Name Gibril R. Cole, The Krio of West Africa

Thomas F. McDow, Buying Time Laura Fair, Reel Pleasures Elizabeth W. Giorgis, Modernist Art in Ethiopia

Elizabeth W. Giorgis

Modernist Art in Ethiopia

Ohio University Press

Athens

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701 ohioswallow.com © 2019 by Ohio University Press All rights reserved To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax). Printed in the United States of America Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ƒ ™ 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Giorgis, Elizabeth W., author. Title: Modernist art in Ethiopia / Elizabeth W. Giorgis. Other titles: New African histories series. Description: Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, 2019. | Series: New African histories | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018045761| ISBN 9780821423462 (hc : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780821423479 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780821446539 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Modernism (Art)--Ethiopia. | Art, Ethiopian--20th century. | Art, Ethiopian--21st century. | Art--Political aspects--Ethiopia. Classification: LCC N7386 .G56 2019 | DDC 709.630904--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045761

In memory of my brother Getinet Wolde Giorgis. In memory also of the artists and intellectuals who flourished in the postwar period but who passed on in recent decades, many of whom have not received the acclaim they deserve from a country that they so deeply revered. This book bears witness to their rich and versatile political and cultural lives.

Please tell me bird about his last gasp You who flew to the downcast dusk Of a place called Oklahoma, how did it sound? Trampled with morning chills and struck with gravels of snow That foreign land Where the shuttered light of loneliness bemoaned Uttered words of closure avowed Please tell me bird about his last gasp When the shades and hues of Ethiopia shattered How did it sound? The conclusion ker’arayso Gebre No proxy can come to compensate But how was it? Aye! when a dream got swindled In Oklahoma a foreign land Your paintbrush is a torching flame You blazed Gebre But I don’t know if you have died Excerpt from “Metne Ya Gedegeda” (Translation mine) A tribute to the painter and poet Gebre Kristos Desta, who died in Oklahoma in 1981, by the poet and playwright Tsegaye Gebremedhin. (This powerful poem is hard to translate literally. I simply conveyed the general feeling of the poem.)

Contents

List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction







Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

ix xiii xvii 1

Early to Mid-twentieth-century Modernism (1900–1957) and the Formation of the Fine Art School

25

Intellectual Thought of the 1960s The Prime of Ethiopian Modernism

80

The Modernists of the 1960s Gebre Kristos Desta and Skunder Boghossian and Their Students

118

Enat Hager Weym Mot (Revolutionary Motherland or Death) Art during the Derg, 1974–91

184

Contemporary Ethiopian Art 1995–2015

247

Conclusion

Notes Bibliography Index

293 301 325 335

Illustrations

1.1a and b

1.2

Advertisements for a car and cognac in the newspaper Berhanena Selam

38

Belachew Yimer, Battle of Adwa

43



1.3

Agegenhu Engida, Self-Portrait

65



1.4

Emaelaf Hiruy, Shemaglew

72



3.1

Gebre Kristos Desta, Golgotha

123



3.2

Gebre Kristos Desta, Self-Portrait

125



3.3

Gebre Kristos Desta, Green Abstract

127



3.4

Gebre Kristos Desta, Remembering Marga

131



3.5

Gebre Kristos Desta, In the Third World

135



3.6

Gebre Kristos Desta, In the Grotto

136



3.7

Skunder Boghossian, The Nourishers Series

146



3.8

Skunder Boghossian, Juju’s Night Flight of Dread and Delight

147

Henok Melkamzer, Ethiopian zodiac

157



3.9



3.10

Henok Melkamzer, detail of Figure 3.9

157



3.11

Skunder Boghossian, Untitled

160

ILLUSTRATIONS x



3.12

Skunder Boghossian, Time Cycle III

163



3.13

Skunder Boghossian, Inferno at Axum

165



3.14

Zerihun Yetimgeta, Wax and Gold

175



3.15

Desta Hagos, The Stage

179



4.1

Afework Tekle, Mother Ethiopia

191



4.2

Eshetu Tiruneh, Rehab Yefetaw

193



4.3

Gebre Kristos Desta, Untitled

195



4.4

Bekele Haile, Ethiopia be Yekatit 66

197



4.5

Esseye Gebremedhin, Untitled

199



4.6

Mengesha Seuym, Enamert

201



4.7

Tsige Sheferaw, Untitled

202



4.8

Tebebe Dessie, Untitled

206



4.9

Abebe Kassaye, Untitled

207



4.10

Esseye Gebremedhin, Women Marching

211



4.11

Elizabeth Habtewold, Wehemia

218



4.12

Haregwa Zeru, Addis Ababa

228



4.13

Daniel Taye, Ferd

229



4.14

Felege Selam Demissie, Kalkidan

230



4.15

Leoul Sahle Mariam, Beshah Haile

230



4.16

Samuel Sharew. Dil ke bahr mado

231



4.17

Kebedech Tekleab, The River in Rwanda

241



4.18

Bisrat Shebabaw, Enat meret damena

243



5.1

Behailu Bezabih, L’Arc de Triomphe

255



5.2

Bekele Mekonnen, Our Time

256



5.3

Mulugeta Gebrekidan, Performance for the Wax and Gold Project

260



5.4

Bekele Mekonnen, Enkokelesh

263



5.5

Bekele Mekonnen, Oromiya Martyr’s Monument

264



5.6

Michael Tsegaye, Future Memories VII

270



5.7

Michael Tsegaye, Chasms of the Soul: A Shattered Witness III

271



5.8

Berhanu Ashagrie, Space, Place, Displacement

274



5.9

Berhanu Ashagrie, Friendship in Time and Space

275



5.10

Eyob Kitaba, Afalgugne

277



5.11

Dawit Abebe, Jerba

279

Bisrat Shebabaw, Untitled

284

Mihret Kebede, The Red Diary

287

5.12



5.13

5.14a and b Helen Zeru, Memory Back and Forth

291

xi ILLUSTRATIONS

Preface

For six years, I served as the director of the most prominent archive of Ethiopia, the Institute of Ethiopian Studies (IES) at Addis Ababa University. If history is selectively produced and silenced in the analytic content of archival production, this is nowhere more pronounced than in the IES’s archival space. Some of the urgent questions that I broach in this book were conceived in this same archival space, where the time of a discriminating past emerged in the difficulties and constraints of the present. Fortunately, and all at once woefully, my intimate experiences with this particular archive and the bodies of knowledge that it produced and suppressed spurred my curiosity, and I pedantically read the voices behind the politics of silence. I have used the fundamental analytical questions underlying the archive’s selective inclusions and exclusions to come up with what we might call a theory of Ethiopian modernity and modernism. The orthodoxies that shape the studies of Ethiopia—its culture, history, and aesthetic imagining—call attention to the categories that conjure the images of the country and, most importantly, the extent to which these studies, as fields of study, have undermined the intellectual philosophies that shaped African American, African, and West Indian strands of thought. This exceptionalist perspective, in some of its central positions, has subsequently reduced the significance of the colonial myth and ideology. Furthermore, in a fundamentally hegemonic body of knowledge, it has fostered an implicit, twofold assumption in its definition of Ethiopia. The first is a superior northern and Semitic imagination of Ethiopia. The second is the non-Semitic variety that the field of study persists in constructing as an inferior antithesis, and its vast body of knowledge continues to be absent in the writings of history.

Preface xiv

In one of the few works that significantly depart from the official narratives of the studies of Ethiopia, historian Fikru Negash Gebrekidan examined the relationship of Ethiopian studies to black studies to insightfully explore what he called “the three traditions”:1 Semitic Orientalism, Marxism, and black studies. In Ethiopia in Black Studies from W. E. B. Du Bois to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Fikru wrote about Du Bois’s understanding of the Ethiopian past, a subject that Du Bois examined in his 1915 publication entitled The Negro. According to Fikru, Du Bois, “who had long remained anathema”2 to conventional Ethiopianists and whose thesis “has persisted in the fringes of Ethiopian Studies,”3 has always frustrated Semitic Orientalism. Certainly, for the Semitic Orientalists, Ethiopia is what anthropologist Donald Levine called “an outpost of Semitic civilization,”4 in which the Judeo-Christian legacies purportedly made the country’s history exceptional and matchless in comparison to the rest of the African continent. For Marxists who reached political maturity in the 1960s, Ethiopia was encumbered by a feudal class structure, and in this regard, Marxist activists claimed the Ethiopian experience was unlike other African encounters. They called for a peasant-led agrarian revolution, which culminated in the mass uprising of 1974 that ousted the monarchy. For advocates of black studies, Ethiopia had historically been symbolic of racial redemption and pride. The country’s unique colonial history—Ethiopia was not colonized but only occupied by Italy from 1936 to 1941—and its rich history dating back to the Axumite civilization have shaped potent imagery of Ethiopia in black consciousness. For Fikru, the Marxists and the Orientalists shared “an insular statist historiography in which the maritime exploits of Axum and its Judeo-Christian legacies were celebrated as the hallmark of Ethiopian exceptionalism.”5 He argued that such an established knowledge base with its exceptionalist viewpoint was contested in black studies—which Du Bois pioneered— where “the convergent historiography [of] Axumite, Nubian, and Egyptian civilizations were interlaced together in a broader Nile valley narrative.”6 In this book, I hope to destabilize the normative prototypes of an Ethiopian humanist knowledge that rejects such continental agency in its knowledge base. And in a modest attempt to generate an alternative thesis on Ethiopian modernity and modernism, I also shed new light on the colonial legacy that noncolonized Ethiopia also shares but that the dogmas framing the studies of Ethiopia cast aside.

Still, my critical evaluation of the factual, informative, and analytical perspectives of Ethiopian humanist knowledge would not be complete if I failed to consider Ethiopian exceptionalism’s masculine readings of knowledge and history. In this regard, my encounters with colleagues as a female academic leader shaped the ways in which I have examined the sociocultural and historical features that informed Ethiopian modernism. I was the first female director of the IES, succeeding several well-regarded academics—historians, anthropologists, and linguists. Challenges of respect and confidence, whether on the part of male colleagues, subordinates, or female colleagues, were experiences I could not isolate from the disciplinary prejudices that the study of Ethiopia informs. On the one hand, my experiences demonstrated to me the difficulties Ethiopian women academics face in the gendered subtext of a masculine norm. On the other hand, they prompted me to urgently initiate a parallel exchange in the ways we research, teach, and mediate the broader geographies and politics of knowledge that are constrained by structural frameworks that systematically silence one history, of which women are important constituents, while privileging another. Exclusion is, of course, a polygonal phenomenon, but the gender lens illuminates the insidious workings and interrelated nature of systemic social exclusion. This is especially significant because many Ethiopian male academics who are embroiled in masculinist, empiricist, and Semiticcentered theories still find it inconceivable that a woman scholar can actually critically apprehend her objects of study. The very fact that I am part of the social history of Ethiopia but also, as a woman, completely erased from the dominant body of knowledge gives this book its distinct flavor. It is my hope that this book and others like it will contribute new and insightful lexicons to the social, intellectual, and aesthetic studies of Ethiopia.

xv Preface

Acknowledgments

This book brings together several disciplines. Certainly, its multicolored authorial understanding has benefited from the expert advice and guidance of many people, without whom this volume would not have been possible. Susan Buck-Morss, Iftikhar Dadi, and Salah Hassan all gave me invaluable insights that were tremendously helpful in developing this work. I am especially indebted to my mentor and friend Professor Salah Hassan for his encouragement and belief in me. His unfailing support has been there since the early 1990s when I started to write about Ethiopian art. I cannot thank him enough for his friendship, trust, and encouragement. Professor Iftikhar Dadi read the manuscript in its early stages, and I am grateful for his valuable comments, which have shaped the final outcome of the book. I am exceptionally indebted to Professor Andreas Eshete, former president of Addis Ababa University, for taking me back to the country where I was born, for trusting my intellectual rigor in times of adversity, and for showing me what a good human being a scholar should be. Andreas, you have been my brother, my mentor, and my friend, and I am thankful for all that you have taught me. Your unreserved trust in my academic work continues to completely disarm me. I am grateful as well to the late Dr. Yonas Admassu, who taught me all I know about Ethiopian literature; I miss his advice and all the petulance that was so charmingly woven in with the love he showed me. I wish to also thank my dearest brother and friend Professor Dagmawi Woubshet, who greeted me with a bottle of champagne after I defended my dissertation at Cornell and has been with me ever since. He read the manuscript with the same love and respect that he has unconditionally given me through the years—and, of course, with the graceful

Acknowledgments xviii

repertoires of comments that I have enthusiastically incorporated. Dagi, you are indeed the perfect blend of knowledge and humanity. My thanks to Konjit Seyum—the founder of Asni Gallery, the first contemporary art gallery in Ethiopia—for opening her world of artists when I returned to my homeland after a twenty-seven-year absence. Many people on the faculty and staff of Addis Ababa University assisted and encouraged me in various ways during the course of writing this book. My research would not have been possible without the special support of the staff of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies. I am thankful for having received much assistance from the librarians of this esteemed institution, where I was fortunate enough to serve as director through much of my research. My appreciation particularly goes to Messay Yohannes, Genet Getaneh, and Eyob Alemayehu for routinely responding to my inquiries. I would also like to thank the faculty and staff of the Skunder Boghossian College of Performing and Visual Arts for assisting me in different capacities, especially Tsigereda Tadele, the managing director of the college, for providing support for all my research needs. My gratitude is also extended to Semeneh Ayalew, Netsanet Gebremichael, Shimelis Bonsa, and Surafel Wondimu, young, upcoming, and cutting-edge scholars of whom I am enormously proud: they will undoubtedly change the course of Ethiopian academic inquiry. They were my source of hope and inspiration as I researched this book, and their work in offering precious feedback was a labor of love that I sincerely appreciate. I also thank Kenedeneh Enedeg from the IES for his useful comments on the liturgies of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Professor Finbarr Barry Flood read my manuscript despite his busy schedule, and I thank him for providing input that was extremely useful. It would have been impossible for me to decode the specific periods of artistic modernism without the assistance of my friends and colleagues Bekele Mekonnen, Behailu Bezabih, Berhanu Ashagrie, and Geta Mekonnen. Not only did they give me choice suggestions on archives, but they also applied their artistic acumen to the images I examined, all of which ultimately sharpened the body of thought I have conveyed. I would also like to thank the following artists for candidly sharing their experiences with me: Desta Hagos, Zerihun Yetimgeta, Abdelrahman Sheriff, Esseye Gebremedhin, Tadesse Mesfin, Bisrat Shebabaw, Elizabeth Habtewold, Robel Temesgen, Eyob Kitaba, Mihret Kebede, and Helen Zeru. Without their precious observations and aesthetic judgments,

this book would not have materialized. Gashe Abate Mekuria, the great playwright of modern Ethiopian theater who passed away in 2016, greatly contributed to the key assumptions I made about the artists and intellectuals of the 1960s. His charm and sophistication were captivating, and I am extremely privileged to have worked with him for a few years. My close acquaintance with the late Skunder Boghossian, Tsegaye Gebremedhin, and Solomon Deressa was significant to my entry into the art and literary world and to the formation of this book. I am extremely indebted to the knowledge that I have received from these phenomenal individuals, each of whom has left an indelible mark on Ethiopian intellectual thought and modernism. I am also grateful to Kebedech Tekleab for the friendship she offered when I was trying to find my way into the art world during the 1990s. I was tremendously fortunate to be helped by the staff of the National Museum of Ethiopia and particularly its curators, Girma Bulti and Fitsum Teferra. My appreciation also goes to Daniel Worku, who assisted in organizing the images, and to Fiona McKinnon, who proofread the text. Agazit Abate was kind enough to organize the final text, and my appreciation goes out to her as well. I am immensely indebted to two beautiful friends who anchored me throughout this project: Meaza Birru and Ethiopia Tadesse. Ethiopieye, you were a true comrade when I felt discouraged, and I thank you for the unreserved love and encouragement that you have given me. And Maeziye, I could not have made it in Ethiopia if it had not been for you. Your overwhelming generosity, unwavering trust, and solid advice have taught me patience and courage. It is through you and my involvement with the Sheger 102.1 radio programs, as well as the station’s rich archive that you single-handedly built, that I was able to fully comprehend the intellectual movements of different periods. And it is also through you that I was able to withstand all the gender-biased stereotypes that challenged me throughout my academic career in Ethiopia. My sincere appreciation goes to you for being the woman you are, resilient and honorable. I have learned much from you about womanhood in a country that is so mercilessly misogynist, and I thank you for that. Finally, nobody has been more important to me in the pursuit of my graduate studies than my brother Getinet Wolde Giorgis, who passed away in 2011. He was my enduring source of strength throughout the frustration and loneliness that accompanied my decision to go to graduate school in

xix

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments xx

midlife after a lucrative career in banking and finance. Despite his illness, he helped me overcome many setbacks and stay focused on my graduate study, and he was a constant source of love and concern. He would have been extremely happy to see this book come to fruition—and I dedicate it to him.

Elizabeth W. Giorgis Addis Ababa

Introduction

In March 1999, I walked into Skunder Boghossian’s apartment to be greeted by an old and bulky bedspring lying in the middle of the living room floor. I had met Skunder in 1996, and by then, I was familiar with seeing strange and abstruse objects in his home, which he also used as a working studio space. This particular object, however, was perplexing in its physical type. A friend, he said, had dropped it off for him. Live and let live was a motto he often repeated. It was part of my initiation into Skunder’s world, a form of good manners, to understand that I was not to discuss these peculiar objects or ask about their purpose. Skunder was commissioned to do the Wall of Representation, a mural for the Ethiopian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and I used to travel every weekend from my home in New Jersey to assist him with the project. Nothing was customary with Skunder, even the friends who delivered shreds, odds and ends, ruins, and scraps to his studio. It was amazing that so many people thought of him when they saw the queer and the anomalous and considered such things a bounty for their friend. The truth is that, by 1999, I had also become this type of friend. The regulation and uniformity of my world, so closely related to my former career in banking and finance, had been disrupted by the furiousness of Skunder’s place. I found that I had begun to relish the beauty of wreckage. In the beginning of our friendship, I was bewildered by the objects and the disarray, which was truly extraordinary—intense but also unexpected. The futon sleeper, tilted and damaged, was always covered with a board that was only removed when a guest required a seat; the chair was frequently concealed by painting accessories; the table was enveloped in

Modernist Art in Ethiopia 2

canvases. And, of course, the bed was comfortably occupied by Cali the cat. Newspapers, plastic bags, wood scraps, and other odd items had long since taken over the floor, and my early attempts to organize the space only elicited Skunder’s fury. Nor was he amused by indifference to his clutter; rather, he demanded absolute and complete sensitivity to it. His was a space without restraint where furniture and equipment were equally functional, their ultimate endurance and performativity accidental rather than deliberate. They became part of the clutter, anticipating their fate—to be destroyed, molded, and then reborn (or not)—sometimes after several years of waiting to no avail. The finished paintings always dominated. Impeccable and overwhelmingly attractive, the paintings conveyed sheer pleasure amid the bewildering commotion. On a typical day at Skunder’s, atypical as every day always was, the clutter, the paintings, the cat, the music, and his loud voice somehow harmonized and resonated with the visitor. The music was almost always jazz; as his friend Solomon Deressa said, “Jazz, the supreme creation of a people in exile, opened Skunder to his own experiences of exile.”1 And so, I learned to accept this paradox of normality and even to appreciate the genius of this state of disorder and its perfect harmony in the midst of pandemonium.

 The bedspring was intriguing, and I was certain that it would inspire one of Skunder’s amazing designs. What had felt like anxiety when I was first introduced to his language of objects—their secrets, innocence, or duplicity—had in time become excitement, and I remember agreeing with him on the bedspring’s delicate yet robust beauty. By then, I had grown accustomed to the enigmatic nature of visual elicitations. Through my friendship with him, I came to realize that, as had happened in our shared country’s history, texture and time cooperate in evoking specific forms and entities out of a world of muddles. And everything in that room of his had a purpose—perhaps not as yet obvious but nonetheless a fate. His obsession with creating from wreckage had stimulated my mind. I knew in March 1999, with a bedspring as a source of inspiration, that I would write about shapes that had already emerged or were in the process of emerging. When and how I did not know, but I understood that I would not remain the same predictable and conventional person I had been and that I would someday understand forms and expose new ones that were there all along—in textures,

compositions, and relationships. Fifteen years after Skunder’s death, the most vivid memories of his home come to mind, particularly his fascination with “things that witness their time.”2 And so, in this book, I make an attempt to appreciate the forms and textures of an Ethiopian aesthetic by simultaneously unraveling the temporal potency of its space.

 Skunder Boghossian, who is widely believed to be one of the founders of Ethiopian modernism, studied art in Paris from 1957 to 1966 at the height of the movement for African liberation and independence and its politicized philosophy. If the artist’s craft was of particular importance, deconstructing the boundaries of European modernism that codified theories of images, shapes, and movements was equally critical for Skunder, as works of art outside the West were considered either “primitive” or lacking in and mimetic of a discriminatory modern European universal. Inspired by decolonization’s landscape of optimism, Skunder reexamined and unpacked conventional narratives of European modernism to generate his own articulation of African modernism. By appropriating European aesthetic strategies and juxtaposing his own images, he progressively contested the political, cultural, and intellectual praxis of the Western art market, as well as the academy that had framed the legitimacy of modern African art while often hindering its recognition. As African art historian Salah Hassan has indicated, early modernists such as Skunder revealed “the plurality of modernity, even in its European context, and the realization that there are other modernisms beyond the European context.”3 With its political and aesthetic magnitude, Skunder’s extraordinary imagination calls readers’ attention to the relations or differences between early African modernists who rose to subvert modernism’s colonial hierarchy and countless Ethiopian modernists (many of whom are considered in this book) who emerged from a very different history. Certainly, Skunder was first artistically noteworthy in addressing the historical, cultural, and intellectual crises of colonial subjectivity during the early years of resistance against colonialism. But his visual contributions that laid bare the critical association between the ideologies of colonialism and the politics of decolonization were neither conceived nor developed in Ethiopia’s modernism history. One could easily attribute this to the country’s unique colonial history.

3

Introduction

Modernist Art in Ethiopia 4

Indeed, it is impossible to fully appreciate the conditions of Ethiopian artistic modernism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries without considering the political and cultural implications of colonialism and the politics of decolonization. Whether Ethiopia was colonized or not, emphasis should be placed on the power relations between Ethiopia and the West—a relationship of margin to center that was hardly free of colonial influence or domination. And yet, the profound cultural, political, and discursive exigencies of Western imperial hegemony occupy a paradoxical space that is neither intimate nor remote in Ethiopia’s artistic and intellectual history. That most scholars and artists have unapologetically expressed deeply ingrained feelings of exclusivity by no means simplifies the question, fostering parallels between Ethiopia and the rest of colonized Africa while ultimately abstracting any sense of commonality with the colonial experience. That said, my fundamental thesis is the following: Ethiopian modernity and modernism are constitutive of the larger political and ideological history of modernity. And as Walter Mignolo indicated, “Coloniality . . . is constitutive of modernity—there is no modernity without coloniality.”4 When we think along Mignolo’s lines, coloniality is the stability of colonial practices embedded in the project of modernity through which Western ideas and ideals are ingrained in the non-West. Perhaps a quote from Samir Amin, one of coloniality’s early evaluators, is also appropriate: “The European West is not only the world of material wealth and power, including military might, it is also the site of the triumph of the scientific spirit, rationality and practical efficiency, just as it is the world of tolerance, diversity of opinions, respect for human rights and democracy.”5 In this case, the West “is the best of the world”6 and the non-West its antithesis. Hence, what I persistently raise in this book are the critical questions of coloniality that a few artists such as Skunder crucially understood, unlike many others I cover here, and how the central issues of coloniality were translated, transformed, and adapted in the making of Ethiopian modernism and modernity. In an ironic way, noncolonized Ethiopia offers a very interesting comparative cultural space to explore the alterity of the colonized, affording a fascinating sociocultural context for the phenomenon of modernism. Indeed, noncolonized Ethiopia’s woven texture of culture and politics raises doubts about the possibility of any simplistic comparison (however constructed) between the modern and the premodern; between the colonized, the noncolonized,

and the postcolonized; or, even more urgently in this case, between the modern and the noncolonized. At one level, the modern history of Ethiopia (1900 to the present) is exclusively sheltered in what Richard Iton called “the language game . . . that allows few possibilities for agency, autonomy or substantive negotiation.”7 I am obviously talking about the accolades, the praise, and the romance of Ethiopia that historically invigorated the sensibilities of black consciousness for Africans in the continent and the wider diaspora. The expansiveness of Ethiopia’s time line, which dates back to the civilization of Axum in the fourth century AD,8 its millennia-old manuscripts, monuments, and texts, and its sovereign polity have not only complicated Western images of black people but also caused Ethiopia to be imagined as a living symbol of freedom for Africans in the continent and the diaspora. The Battle of Adwa in 1896, where Emperor Menelik II (1844–1913) defeated Italian colonial aggression, had galvanized this image all the more among Africans living under colonial rule, since Ethiopia defeated a European colonial power and thereby exposed the myth that white armies in Africa were unassailable. But at another level, leaders had little inclination to connect with the black imagination. They were more interested in garnering tributes than in fostering a productive relationship with black politics, since they saw Ethiopia as a chosen nation. Up until the revolution of 1974, which ousted the monarchy,9 citizens were urged to believe that monarchs originated from a divine genealogy—going back to Menelik I, the son of King Solomon of Israel and Queen Sheba of Ethiopia—and to trust that Ethiopia was a chosen nation and, as such, was unlike the rest of the African continent. What is ultimately ironic is not so much Ethiopia’s indifference to the black imagination but the textures of the indigence that has eclipsed the country in the twenty-first century and that, more ironic still, muffled Ethiopia’s name in black politics and imaginary. In a special issue on Ethiopian literature, art, and culture, the editors of Callaloo beautifully expressed the quandaries, the ironies, and the deferred dreams of this land called Ethiopia: The voices and images of modern Ethiopia speak to each other and to the world. In ways that very few societies can, modern Ethiopians have seen the world through a multi-colored stained glass. They look back to a time when theirs was one of

5

Introduction

Modernist Art in Ethiopia 6

the richest and most powerful in the world, and have seen it too as one of the poorest and least understood. They speak of both pride and struggle, conquest and famine, nationalism and intense division, loss and longing: what better set of voices to articulate what it means to be human in the world.10 Callaloo’s special issue was accompanied by a conference held at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies (IES) at Addis Ababa University, where I served as director from 2005 to 2011. Perhaps the following anecdote will help explain the paradox of Ethiopian exceptionalism in the face of the African American imaginary. In my position at the IES, I hosted a group of forty African American academics who were visiting my homeland. Initially, they were elated by the splendor they saw—the magnificence of the Orthodox Church, the scent of the incense that besieged the church compound, the people, the mesmerizing aroma of unadulterated coffee, and much more. But their joy swiftly turned to anguish when they confronted evidence of the country’s rampant poverty. As one of Ethiopia’s most prominent poets, Tsegaye Gebremedhin, wrote: “Whose eye for beauty has gone dim, avers the sky is darkness, not bloom. The wretched one.”11 Clearly, this was not the Ethiopia that my African American brothers and sisters imagined, and deep expressions of sadness about the human condition resonated whenever we left the safety of the conference space. For these colleagues, it was a complicated pilgrimage, indeed, to this land that they had once regarded with pride. Of course, they knew about the devastating famines of 197312 and 1984,13 but their knowledge of these occurrences was overpowered by their intimate familiarity with the Battle of Adwa that they so deeply revered. They had passionately taught their students that Adwa was celebrated by black transnational activists, including W. E. B. Du Bois, who saw in Ethiopia the “idea of global African unity.”14 Their students learned from them that almost ten years after the infamous Berlin Conference (1884–85) that partitioned Africa, the victory at Adwa was a triumphant symbol of resistance against colonial aggression in the age of empire. Indeed, my African American colleagues taught their students about Ethiopia’s history of many centuries that shaped potent imagery of the country in black consciousness. But that this land called Ethiopia was also a land of pain, famine, and abject poverty was a reality they knew yet all the same did not expect. In fact, the severity of the situation was so

blatantly pronounced that it was hard for them to even acknowledge, and initially, their minds could not accept this truth, for distance had tempered the harshness of reality. In the face of this repressive quandary, it was the Ethiopians, my colleagues at the IES, who should have provided comfort to these people. They should have told them that the situation was not so grievous as it appeared and that they would come together with their African American colleagues to give Ethiopia’s present condition meaning. But the arrogance of history had made most of my colleagues indifferent. Instead of reaching out, they looked at the African Americans as anomalies: after all, they were descendants of slaves that they so tragically patronized. As this and similar experiences reveal, the romance of Ethiopia has yet to address the fundamental terms of our present disorder—the hypothesis, logic, and predicament of the coloniality of our noncolonized land. My position in relation to the present study, such as my formative years and academic training in the United States, where the structural problems of coloniality and race are persistently deliberated, may have prejudiced my perception, since my central argument in this book is focused on systems of colonial domination and exploitation—systems that, I argue, the core area of Ethiopian academic inquiry has broadly failed to interrogate. The glaring omissions of such knowledge in this academic inquiry and in the wider intellectual thought inevitably demonstrate the extent of anticolonial thinking in historical knowledge. It is precisely this disjuncture that, in fact, characterizes Ethiopian modernity and modernism, accounting for the peculiarity of the various intellectual and artistic currents that I cover. And my primary and central concern is this disregard of colonial epistemes by Ethiopian historians and intellectuals and the historiographical implication that this has produced. It was six years after I returned to Ethiopia when I welcomed my African American colleagues to the country of my birth. I felt their disappointment and pain then, but my hope had not yet been stifled. Seven years later, I feel much more acrimonious because I still have not found the intellectual joy that fully understands the meaning of subalternity in both its local and global contexts. Scholars such as David Scott have argued that the postcolonial is a new “problem space,”15 one that requires us to pose new questions about present-day problems if we are to anticipate an opportune future. Scott has said queries of postcolonialism continue to

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lament the grim effects of colonialism, as well as the resistance and liberation movements that overpowered the colonial structure. His argument prompts me to emphasize that colonial differences still require multiple and variegated debates. And perhaps Ethiopia should begin to substantially bemoan Africa’s colonial past, contrary to what Scott says, in order to imagine dissent outside of its own nostalgic past. I hope this book and others in the same vein will begin to give voice to the silence and void around the historical, cultural, and political configuration of the imperial-colonial matrix of power and its condition in the Ethiopian intellectual space. This book is one of the few works in Ethiopian scholarship that most emphatically recognize that the country’s singularity cannot be conceived outside the broader colonial legacy, and it resituates the deliberations of modernity and modernism as a project in a new and alternative perspective. It is a crucial intervention after decades of unsettled theoretical and conceptual concerns by Ethiopian intellectuals who wrote in the name of modernity, but used colonially mediated modernization projects and processes. These processes have epistemologically excluded knowledge from the larger global networks of ideas that pertain to modernity and coloniality. Drawing on a range of archives—historical and literary texts, newspaper reportage, poems, popular languages and their occasioning—and in conversation with the main ideas in intellectual thought, I explore the historical emergence of modernism within the foundational categories of the geopolitical imperatives of political modernity. I seek to understand movements of thought and, most importantly, to fathom the relationship of ideas to artistic practice in different periods of modernism’s history. The link between intellectual thought and modern artistic practice is significant. And thus, I place Ethiopian visual modernism in the institutional and ideological context within which it was produced. This type of examination opens a larger perspective from which to view the range of images that conjure the historical experiences of modernism, particularly in the absence of written sources that pertain to Ethiopia’s modern art history. Offering a portrait of the disparate experiences of twentieth- and twentyfirst-century Ethiopia, the book extends a compelling reading of the varied precedents of the country’s political and intellectual history to understand the ways in which the import and range of visual narratives were mediated across different moments.

Modernity and Modernization in the Writings of History

As I look into the intellectual registers that informed modernism, I find it is the ideological orientation of modernization that has recurrently dominated the core academic inquiry and that has shaped and produced intellectual thought as well as artistic practice and subjectivity. As early as the 1920s when intellectuals responded to the challenges posed by the lack of modern education and infrastructure, the incorporation of Western knowledge and innovation was presumed imperative. Motivated by the dangers of colonial subjugation that surrounded border countries, intellectuals sought Western infrastructures and knowledge to mitigate the concerns about sovereignty. And in a predominantly ethnoreligious construction that afforded legitimacy to the Orthodox Church and to the northern and Semitic constituency, they assumed divinity to be real and saw monarchy and seletane—which means “civilization” but was often interchanged with “Westernization” and “modernization”—as a complementarity that functioned dialogically. But the global organization of seletane that they sought to appropriate from Europe had always been woven in with the larger political ideologies of modernity, though for these intellectuals, seletane simply meant freeing the nation from ignorance—it only meant the movement of science and industry. Indeed, the question of how Ethiopia could be equal to Europe dominated the writings of intellectuals just as the probing of “Otherness” did. Two of the most prominent intellectuals of the 1920s, Fitawrari Deressa Amente and Hakim Workeneh Eshete, for instance, often used the massive industrialization and modernization of early twentieth-century Japan as a model for overcoming European economic supremacy. How seletane was appropriated and translated by the ensuing intellectual generation is crucial to examine, since it is in the understanding of succeeding intellectual thought that we espouse the sustaining philosophies behind the philosophies of modernity and the evolution of the aesthetic imagining of modernism. Ruminating on the nature of some of the notable literatures of the past few decades that pertain to themes of modernity and modernization, I evaluate the types of emphases placed and the questions exposed in these writings. In one of his most original works, Pioneers of Change: Reformist Intellectuals of the Early 20th Century (2002), Bahru Zewde acknowledged

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that modernization arrived in Africa “through the midwifery of colonial rule,”16 and he deliberated on mitigations in response to the modernization routes that the West had prescribed for Africa. He gave a range of synopses on colonial education and its acculturation process in various regions of the continent. He also considered the efforts made by African intellectuals in challenging the cultural hegemony of the West, but he nonetheless fell short of addressing the repercussions of such hegemonies in spaces of knowledge production that African scholars such as Valentin Mudimbe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o extensively engaged.17 As a scholar who worked arduously on archiving the intellectual history of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1960s, Bahru grappled with the difference between modernization and Westernization without unpacking the politics of knowledge associated with the modernization processes of less developed economies and without articulating the broad historical movement of modernity, colonial or capitalist, that is imperative for any analysis on debates of modernization. By contrast, philosopher Messay Kebede, in Survival and Modernization: Ethiopia’s Enigmatic Present; A Philosophical Discourse (1998), argued that the efforts made by the Ethiopian state in the twentieth century to modernize the country muddled modernization with Westernization. Further, he contended that such confusion, which he said were political traditions of “supra ethnic”18 ideology and opportunities for “elite mobility,”19 contributed to the alienation of citizens from their cultural identity. For Messay, projects of modernization, which he deemed synonymous with notions of modernity, were exclusively sponsored by the state: they were imposed by imperial autocracy and centralization before 1974 and by socialist centralization of power and the intensification of class oppression and “social ossification”20 after 1974. These were crucial developments that uprooted the country from what he called its unique cultural identity. He argued that the failure of modernization was primarily caused by the introduction of modern education, which led to an alienated class of individuals who aimed at “reinstating cultural identity” and who took a “misguided detour” by way of waging a revolution. And as he saw it, this revolution was a political, economic, and cultural catastrophe and hence a failed project of modernity.21 In this sense, his appraisal of the history of modernization was no more than a tableau of crises. What is more, he essentially rooted Ethiopia’s “cultural identity” in the ethos of the Orthodox Church, excluding the non-Christian population from the Ethiopian polity.

Similar to Bahru, he discounted the genesis and evolution of the political and ideological history of colonial or postcolonial modernity, although he attempted to complicate the experiences of modernity by insightfully constructing a notion of modernity that was neither a negation of nor extrinsic to tradition. Nevertheless, he simplified the shortcomings of modernity by reclaiming a glorious past, which he implied the modernist interventions of the twentieth century undermined. Here, once again, the question involved how well competing discourses justified historical specificities. Indeed, the projects of modernization that both Bahru and Messay examined played a key role in the dispersion of colonial power, imparting various practices by which subjects apprehended themselves and others. But as sociologist Fouad Makki has stressed, it was essential “to integrate the Ethiopian social formation into the more general historical sociology of the international of which it is a part.”22 What was crucial, consequently, was scholars’ disengagement with the genesis and evolution of the political and ideological history of capitalism and how knowledge was produced and reproduced between precapitalist and capitalist systems. The dynamic features of the knowledge of modernity and modernization have also been conveyed in other diverging epistemological structures. Although there are very few such structures, I believe they have the potential to answer questions of modernity that have yet to be examined in historical writings. In one of the most philosophical insights of modernity, Andreas Eshete, a prominent founder of the Ethiopian Student Movement that was pivotal in the uprising of 1974, said the student movement not only disrupted the realm of Ethiopian politics in a radical way but also played a critical role in the making of Ethiopian modernity. In “Modernity: Its Uniqueness and Its Advent in Ethiopia”—two lectures given in March 2009 and November 2011 as part of the series Zemaniwinet: Perspectives on Ethiopian Modernity—Andreas interrogated the variegated narratives of the experiences of modernity and its intellectual enterprise. He stated: “Leaving aside worries about the emergence of modernity and its causes, we can arrive at rich characterizations of modernity that people with different historical and ethical perspectives can accept. A special feature and self-image is that modernity is the end, not of course chronologically—in the Hegelian sense—but categorically of history defined as the realization of human freedom.”23 Andreas principally charted the central values of modernity and, more importantly, the significance of fraternity as one of

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modernity’s imperative ideals. He looked into specific contexts that he considered unique to Ethiopia and that he believed offered a highly vibrant contribution to the debates surrounding modernity. In this regard, he invoked the resonance of the Ethiopian Student Movement, which he described as “a leading public ideal of modernity”; he also remarked that the “Ethiopian Student Movement was a midwife of Ethiopian modernity.”24 Another interesting and provocative work is Donald Donham’s Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution (1999). In an innovative ethnographic study of the Maale people in southern Ethiopia (people from the southern periphery who were historically marginalized), Donham introduced a new reading to the 1974 Ethiopian revolution. His study revealed the various meanings of revolution that emerged from several “points of effect.”25 The Ethiopian revolution of 1974 began as a MarxistLeninist movement but was hijacked by a military junta called the Derg (1974–91), which claimed the same ideology of Marxism-Leninism. “The Ethiopian revolution,” wrote Donham, was “hardly a unitary entity,” since “variously situated groups interpreted events of the Ethiopian revolution”26 in diverse ways. The Christian Maale who welcomed the Zemecha students (students who came from Addis Ababa to Maale land to help implement the 1975 land reform) associated revolution with modernity, which meant better health, a good standard of living, and education. What Donham showed was that significant debates of modernity had also materialized on “the margins of world power and wealth.”27 In this provocative study of ethnography, history, and theory, Donham argued that in late capitalism, structural models were replaced by historical explanations and that historical explanations often complicated and muddled encounters with time, space, representations, and social relationships. He suggested an amalgam between structural models (the Maale) and historical explanations (revolution and Marxist theory) for a more comprehensive perspective on the social and discursive meaning of modernity. The literatures I have examined are the primary works—perhaps excluding Andreas Eshete’s contributions—that reveal forms of state-subject relations in the wider contexts of modernity. Furthermore, they are the most significant—and perhaps the only—works written in historically specific terms and against the general trend of developmentalist theory. Certainly, donor-sponsored narratives of modernization that signify a generic form of modernity have inundated academic inquiry. More exacerbated since

the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) took power in 1991, developmentalist projects have become even more important, and the ideological orientation of the intelligentsia has submitted to new forms of donor-oriented ideological and discursive themes, once again marginalizing the urgent interventions of colonial studies and that area’s relationship to Ethiopian nationalist historiography. As I indicate in chapter 5, the violence of the developmental state of Ethiopia represents unproblematized languages of development (prescriptions of the World Bank and other Western donors as well as new hegemons such as China) that fail to configure the reality in which alterities have transpired. The very nature of modern existence in Addis Ababa, for instance, has created a sense of exile and displacement in one’s own country. With the displacement of millions of people to slumlike establishments outside the city, garish highrise buildings have become a fetish of modernity, representing models of modernization that favor tenuous infrastructure over everyday life. In this regard, the categories of modernity and modernization and ultimately modernism demand new paradigms, fresh readings, and informed encounters to accommodate persistently shifting and diverse experiences. The contemporary artists I examine in chapter 5 are beginning to position the political violence of the neoliberal state in provocative art forms that expose the different categories of truth that have recently emerged. However, there is an urgent need for new cores of academic inquiry that can mutually clarify how societies, economies, and cultural orders are intimately linked to each other and to larger geopolitical contexts. This is significant both to defend citizenship and to combat the violence that is perpetually committed on citizens. Particularly at the present time, the conditions and politics of late capitalism, with its power embedded in transnational corporations, should be seriously examined in contexts of disparate histories. Periodizing Modernism

Since the late 1990s, African art historians such as Hassan and Chika Okeke-Agulu and curators such as Okwui Enwezor have written about early African modernists and their significance in shaping and redefining the evolution of modern African art. Building around the aesthetic and intellectual movements that artists such as Skunder Boghossian ushered in, progressive historians have theorized Africa’s unavoidable dialogue with

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the West to position African modern art as a field of study formed in its own specific claim and association. Okeke-Agulu’s Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth Century Nigeria (2015), which traced the emergence of postcolonial modernism in Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s and its relationship to other contexts of decolonization, and Enwezor’s The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945– 1994 (2002), an exhibition and seminal text that examined the politics of African independence movements, are two of the most important contributions to rethinking colonialism, postcolonialism, and classical modernism, in wide-ranging critical paradigms. To be sure, the dynamic enterprises of modernism reveal an overlapping and contested relationship with the different meanings of modernity that the processes and politics of decolonization have called into question in recent history. In this regard, theories of modernism rooted in colonial and postcolonial forms have also challenged bourgeois representations of aesthetic modernism and avant-gardism to create what Andreas Huyssen called “modernism at large, namely, the cross-national cultural forms that emerge from the negotiation of the modern with the indigenous, the colonial, and the postcolonial in the ‘non-Western’ world.”28 Yet such promises of subaltern agency and its emancipatory potential have rarely been acknowledged in Ethiopian academic inquiry. The question, then, is how to extend the crucial features of such peculiar imaginaries of artists and intellectuals into the contemporary theoretical salience of modernity and modernism, which have grounded signification and representation in wider constellations of colonial consciousness and relations. Clearly, the unique dimensions of Ethiopian visual and intellectual thought have significant consequences in how I theorize modernism within larger contexts of African or non-Western modernism. If we refer to the political theories and practices of one vital historical interlude, we can understand such inimitability. Without doubt, the most important historical period that fundamentally changed the course of modern Ethiopian history is the 1960s, which I also consider the prime of modernism. The period’s aesthetic, intellectual, and political consequences continue to legitimate the spaces of knowledge production. And any study of the movements of decolonization in the 1960s naturally entails, among other things, the beginning of competing ideologies of the colonial past in wider constellations of colonial consciousness and relations.

What is particularly striking in the body of knowledge that was produced in Ethiopia in the 1960s is its broad distance from the histories and theories of colonialism. Regarding the politics of exploitation, rights, and exclusions, intellectuals focused on a Marxist-Leninist understanding of the peasant-landlord relationship to claim Ethiopia was encumbered by an imperial feudal structure, distinct from the colonial arrangement imposed on other African countries. In other words, theirs was a struggle between classes rather than between colonizer and colonized. Though colonialism and decolonization’s broader fields of inquiry were extensively debated by leaders of newly independent African states in the Organization of African Unity (OAU) that was established in Addis Ababa in 1963, colonialism’s representational strategies and the crisis of subjectivities that was created by colonialism had little impact on Ethiopian artists’ and intellectuals’ political philosophies. This cultural and political movement, in turn, galvanized Ethiopian artists, writers, and intellectuals, not necessarily against the colonial powers’ cultural hegemony but against the ambiguities of modern citizenship in the Ethiopian state. Passionately expressing a spirit of dissent that envisioned a fair and just Ethiopian nation-state, intellectuals believed that capitalism was a global system and that the working class had to act as part of a global class in order to overcome class conflict, without which emancipation from oppression would never materialize. Between these two boundaries—one that questionably released Ethiopia from the colonial experiences of Africa and another that clearly stood against the very same Ethiopia that had denied justice and equality—I address and theorize the ironies that constituted the tensions and unresolved relationships between African colonial history and the colonial history of Ethiopia. Moving between the different theoretical registers of modernity and modernism that arose in the past three decades and the discursive elements and epistemes of the specific historical periods and contexts of Ethiopia, I take Raymond Williams’s popular query, When was modernism?—an interrogation that he described as “a historical questioning of what is, in very different ways a problem, but also a dominant and misleading ideology”29—and ask a similar question, When and what was modernism in Ethiopia? The historical questioning of modernism in Ethiopia requires the investigation of a series of genealogies, and the question of how these genealogies are best conceived necessitates a periodization of the country’s modern history

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from an epistemological and political perspective. In an article entitled “Modernity and Revolution” (1984), Perry Anderson critiqued notions of modernity and modernism that were conceptualized in Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982).30 Anderson’s central argument problematized the concept of modernity and modernism espoused by Berman. In discussing European modernisms of the fin de siècle, Anderson described three factors: a usable classical past through official academicism, an indeterminate technical present with various future possibilities, and an unpredictable future with a prospect of revolution. Anderson was suggesting that the homogenized concept of European modernism had lost much of its coherence, even in Europe itself, with increasing historical claims. And the antinomies of European modernism had to be repositioned beyond the partial view of earlier classical theories of modernism. Anderson’s central argument was this: the conjunctures of modernism are uneven, with specific multinational conceptions and contexts, since its materialization varies with time and place. I invoke Anderson’s argument concerning European modernism’s uncertainty to help me map out the temporalities of Ethiopian modernism, a modernism that cannot be drawn through the classical text. What were the temporalities that suggest a conjectural explanation of aesthetic practices that were grouped as modernist? To answer this question, it is necessary to frame a set of important historical coordinates that implicated movements of modernist significations. This scheme can ultimately convey modernism’s contextual origins and reception, as well as the recovery of its historical meaning. The proposed vestiges of these coordinates are: (1) the victory in the Battle of Adwa in 1896; (2) the shock of the 1936 Italian invasion that fundamentally upset the political order and Emperor Haile Selassie’s flight to exile; (3) the adoption of “official nationalism” and the end of global colonialism that was partly motivated by the end of empire in the 1960s; (4) the eruption of mass uprisings in 1974 that were hijacked by a socialist military junta and the emergence of dictated aesthetics; and (5) the predicaments of contemporary art after the fall of the military junta in 1991. Different generations of artists within these coordinates reworked modernism on an ongoing basis. Emphasizing prominent artists, this book evaluates Ethiopian art’s stylized and symbolic aesthetic expressions within these coordinates, in the process elucidating and examining their ideologies, values, and refinements.

Also central to my argument is the historical periodization of modernity that is ensnared with a defined form of temporality. I dispute such a historical meaning of modernity; in fact, that is the principal argument of this book. My task is not to settle the historical meaning of time into a unified and historical imagination of modernity but to bring forth its multiple fragments, ruptures, and imaginations in modernity’s encounter with Ethiopia. In this regard, I elucidate intellectuals’ and artists’ relationship to modernity and modernism to show how it had mostly been constricted to strategies and discourses of the processes of modernization, rather than the complex ideological and political spaces of modernity. Also in this regard, I argue that the debates of colonial and postcolonial encounters are both urgent and necessary. The book does not claim to account for all facets of Ethiopian modernism; rather, it aims to shed light on key episodes of its unexamined history. By focusing on prominent artists such as Belachew Yimer (1895–1957), who worked as one of the first commercial artists in the 1920s; Agegenhu Engida (1905–50), who played an important artistic role before and after the Italian occupation of 1936 to 1941; Emaelaf Hiruy (1908–1971), who engaged in innovative works after the Italian occupation; and Skunder Boghossian (1937–2003) and Gebre Kristos Desta (1932–1981), who fundamentally changed modern art in the 1960s, this book reveals Ethiopian modernism’s multiple historical meanings that are both specific to Ethiopia and transnational in their approach. Tradition and Modernism

It is not possible to even begin discussing the profound ways in which intellectuals and artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have engaged notions of the modern without discussing the exceptionalist myths and ideals of the nation. And different regimes—until the revolution of 1974, distinctively placed the break from direct European domination by a complex repertoire of nation-building discursive practices. For instance, the popular biblical rendering “Envoys will come out of Egypt; Ethiopia will quickly stretch out her hands to God” (Psalm 68:31) is one of many expressions that were periodically reclaimed from antiquity to be used in imperial Ethiopia’s dynastic centralization and state-sponsored nationalism. Since the modern nation itself was discursively formulated in theological terms, artists and

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intellectuals also identified with a nation that was chosen by God. And in tableaus that echoed divine intervention, they aesthetically choreographed a nation’s rescue from colonial bondage. In light of the complexity of political events after the 1974 revolution, the images of modernism would be incomplete without considering the local appeal to an exceptionalist imaginary that continues to linger in the consciousness of Ethiopian modernists. This imaginary ultimately reduced the significant associations between colonialism, postcolonialism, nationalism, and transnationalism, making it a challenge to precisely locate Ethiopia within African colonial history. This is significant because artists’ enigmatic engagement with the colonial legacy and its related politics conveys no single explanation for the complexities that incited the range of Ethiopian modernism. In the 1920s, forms of symbolic imperial social discourse were needed to mobilize the population regarding the promises seletane espoused. One of the different forms of cultural and social discourse that were claimed was an Orthodox Christian identity. And integral to the works of artists and intellectuals of the 1920s were the traditions of the Orthodox Church. Indeed, European travelers, writers, and scholars have extensively written on the country’s rich Christian heritage, including paintings, illustrated manuscripts, church murals, and woodcuts that were produced after the advent of Christianity in the fourth century CE in Axum. But often, such works were described by European chroniclers in an Orientalist construction of “Byzantium art in an African setting.”31 Jules Leroy, one of the early European scholars who wrote on Ethiopian church art, noted, “Although the Ethiopian inhabits Africa, he is not an African in the usual sense in which the word is understood.”32 “But it must be admitted,” he added, “that most of the examples available to us of manuscripts from the fourteenth century are unsightly in appearance. . . . [W]hen these Ethiopian manuscripts are compared with the fine Oriental models from which they have been copied, they seem childish and not a genuine work of art.”33 European writers had, therefore, often framed Ethiopian church art within these two contradictory accounts of exceptionalism and primitivism. On the one hand, the narrative transcribed Orthodox Christianity as a triumphant history of Ethiopia’s greatness, which contributed to its “non-Africanness”; on the other, it denigrated Ethiopian artistic skill, which could never compare to what European writers considered fine art.

What is significant to note is that such Orientalist constructions paradoxically contributed to sentiments of exceptionalism, not only among artists and intellectuals of the 1920s but also among artists and intellectuals of ensuing generations. Often informing the disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities, the Otherness implied in these creations has, to date, rarely been acknowledged as disparaging by Ethiopian artists and intellectuals. Indeed, Orientalism does not occur in an ideological or cultural void, nor is it simply imposed from outside. It is, on the contrary, a joint project between those who produce and those who replicate. The modern history of Ethiopia has also taken shape in an authentically local abstraction that often embraces these types of Orientalist views. But beyond questioning the unique dimensions and implications of these forms of knowledge, I also consider the distinctive social configurations that gave rise to the aesthetic imaginings and intellectual thought that shaped the consciousness of Ethiopian modernists. For example, I argue that Ethiopian modernists emerged from the traditions of the church. When the modern in its self-awareness released modern life from religious dominance, religious consciousness shaped the Ethiopian modern subject. Artists and intellectuals emphatically claimed the traditions of the Orthodox church to represent and legitimate themselves in the contentious politics of modernity. This made the period’s modernism necessary, imparting a substantial and important texture to the movement’s origins and stylistic evolution. One theme that persistently stands out through my interrogation of Ethiopian modernity and modernism is, therefore, the foundation of social change that is composed of and formed by contingencies of “tradition” and the historical past. Although artists of the 1920s eulogized the past to explore new possibilities that functioned in the real and imagined ideals of modernity, artists of the 1930s exalted the past in many state-commissioned works even as they summoned the possibilities of the future in their own private works. And artists of the 1960s devalued different modes of Ethiopian cultural agency while they drew from a wide range of Ethiopian history and philosophy. More recently, younger artists are doing cutting-edge works where the study of tradition has become a core area of inquiry and where artistic styles and genres raise multilayered questions that probe past history to find appropriate conceptual outlines for the present. Against this background, how, then, do we interrogate the competing claims of the past on intellectual thought and on artistic practice and

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subjectivity? And what precisely do we mean by the term tradition? A most insightful reading of tradition that provides valuable insight to rethink our understanding of the term is Talal Asad’s impression of tradition. Responding to David Scott’s Tragic Sensibility of Talal Asad,34 in which Scott interrogated the location of Asad’s work in the “tensions between genealogy and tradition,”35 Asad said that both genealogy and tradition “share something: discipline.”36 In a reply that in large part engaged the meaning of tradition, in contrast to the meaning of Foucauldian genealogy, Asad drew on both genealogy and tradition and stated, “Tradition is also the space in which one experiences a multiplicity of times and confronts a variety of memories.”37 Decentering the normative usage of the term, Asad pointed out that tradition is not an unchanging truth in homogenous time but a method to examine ways in which historically situated discourses condition the present. With its multiple temporalities, tradition is selected, affirmed, modified, abandoned, or reproduced by what Asad calls “its authoritative practices.”38 Two conceptions of tradition give Ethiopian modernism its peculiar reading, one that Asad pointed to as the relevance of tradition in shaping the historical present and the other, a notion of exclusivity that considered Ethiopia as a chosen nation. Although recent works are authored from a vantage point of state developmentalism, in which political economy is the dominant historical event, the politics of knowledge still disguises elements of exceptionalism. It is dismissive in its attitude to the genealogy of colonial consciousness and the geopolitical power relations from which current understandings of developmentalism emerge. The epistemic assumptions and arguments of Ethiopian modernity and modernism that I cover would, therefore, be unfinished without implicating the institutions and memories of tradition and its complications. Given this, one might ask, Which tradition and which knowledge? The control of authority, of the economy, and of knowledge until the revolution of 1974 and, even more, until the EPRDF took power in 1991 to form a polycentric ethnic federalist state was uniquely placed under a northern Semitic hegemony with an Orthodox Christian identity that was intertwined with modern political forms. Though I critically interrogate the agents and institutions that engendered and reproduced the fundamental organization of knowledge that I examine, the rigid social and cultural hierarchies of the Orthodox Church (which I argue gave rise to modernism and modern

subjectivities) play an important role in modernism’s enunciations and conceptual registers—despite the considerable diversity of cultures and populations that do not follow the Orthodox Church. Hence, emphasis should also be placed on the constitutive social and cultural unevenness of modernity and modernism in Ethiopia. Women and Modernism

Regarding women and modernism, it is important to note that inquiries on how gender relations are constructed have historically been pushed aside and in fact are often excluded from scholarship on Ethiopian culture. This is particularly pronounced in Ethiopian modernism’s tangential response to women’s artistic practice. Women artists have been few in number in Ethiopia, and the understanding and legitimating of women’s art have comprised a continuous narrative of a hegemonic gaze, since Ethiopian modernism is mainly organized around a masculine norm. My book incorporates questions about Ethiopian women’s art and artists in modernism’s history. Distributed throughout the chapters of Modernist Art in Ethiopia, women are brought forth—perhaps for the first time in Ethiopian modern history—as participants in the fashioning of modernism.

 The material presented in this book is in large part a result of my six-year directorial tenure at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies of Addis Ababa University, where I was privileged to intimately understand and research one of the most prominent archives of the country. The College of Performing and Visual Art of Addis Ababa University, where I served as dean, has also deepened my historical knowledge of the performing and visual arts. Most importantly, my extensive and in some cases decade-long interactions with artists such as Skunder Boghossian, as well as writers such as Solomon Deressa, Yonas Admassu, and Tsegaye Gebremedhin and playwrights including Abate Mekuria and Tesfaye Gessese, who had prominent roles in the writings and artistic movements of the 1960s, expansively inform the ways in which I interrogate the cultural history of the most important period in modernism’s history; furthermore, these interactions give the book its substantial texture. For instance, my discussion of Skunder Boghossian’s work is primarily based on my interactions with the artist over the course of

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Modernist Art in Ethiopia 22

five years. My close relations with artists and writers, in addition to my work in senior administrative capacities in the most prominent arts and culture repositories of the country, have also enabled me to intimately examine the ways in which artists and writers engaged the culture in which their images and texts were produced. That said, I have done my research with a concern for facts, and I have genuinely tried not to be influenced by my personal biases and friendships with the intellectuals and artists I study, although my imagination and intellectual authority may still exhibit certain forms of partiality. I continue to believe that a new tradition in inquiry, as exemplified in my study, is urgently needed, significantly so when the archive that pertains to Ethiopian art historical studies is a contested domain of knowledge. Breaking away from traditional ethnography and strict art historical disciplinary provisions, I worked through questions formed by an extensive interdisciplinary comparative context. I should say that this approach has expanded the confines of the existing archive. I believe the different materials and vistas that I have used are vital to broadening the potential of Ethiopian humanistic knowledge. Indeed, rather than giving definitive answers, the book explores a wide and broadly unexamined terrain in the history of visual art, as well as the social and intellectual history of Ethiopia. What I am most interested in is the critical intervention and its potential to open a space for more debate on issues that I have raised in the book—issues that, I believe, have rarely been debated in Ethiopian academic inquiry. This study consists of an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. The first chapter explores the negotiation of modernism in its early stages. Portraying the historical experiences of early to mid-twentieth-century modernism (1900–1957), it looks at artists from the period and their forms of inspiration. Furthermore, it examines the Orientalist scholarship of Ethiopian church art to better understand the tensions and contradictions that constructed the knowledge of the art. The work of the writers of Berhanena Selam, a newspaper published from 1925 to 1936, is also extensively surveyed to explore the relationship of intellectual thought to artistic practice in modernism’s early history. In addition, this chapter investigates the organizing principles behind the formation of the Fine Art School in 1957. Building on the first chapter, I examine the intellectual thought of the 1960s in chapter 2. I argue that the sixties represented the heyday of

Ethiopian modernism, and I attempt to place Ethiopian visual modernism in the institutional and ideological context within which it was produced. The intimate rapport between artists, writers, and student activists was vital in shaping the modernism of the 1960s, as well as in altering and manipulating its subsequent formulation. For Africa, the sixties were also a time of transition from colonial rule. But I contend that intellectuals and artists provoked a body of knowledge that did not necessarily engage the histories and theories of colonialism but instead focused on the politics of exploitation, rights, and exclusion. In chapter 3, I examine the works of Skunder Boghossian and Gebre Kristos Desta—two artists who were prominent in Ethiopian modernism’s history—and their students. I also examine artists’ broader social and cultural pan-Africanist commitment, that is, their approaches and forms of resistance, negotiation, and transformation within the wider struggle against colonialism and racial injustice. I situate this period within Ethiopia’s larger intellectual history and its engagement with Africa’s general intellectual history. Chapter 4 examines artistic production during the socialist regime of the military junta. I principally look into the production of art that was supposed to follow a determinate conception of creativity. Restricted styles of pedagogy and officially sanctioned themes and forms were in place. But an analysis of the response by artists during this gruesome period of Ethiopian history shows that the majority of artistic production subversively engaged the power of the state. There is a general agreement on the level of atrocities committed during this period, and much has been written to this regard. But little has been done on the cultural history of the time. Focusing on the remarkable responses in literature and music to the difficult circumstances of the period, chapter 4 also explores the humanism of a politicized society and its unbroken continuity through this dangerous era. Chapter 5 discusses contemporary works of art and movements. Did artists produce work in response to the end of official art and the collapse of authoritarian military rule? Did they mourn, remember, and critically engage with overcoming the past? Did Ethiopian socialism shape the practices of postsocialist contemporary art? What constitutes contemporary Ethiopian art today? And with which issues do artists in Ethiopia now locate their practices? I critically examine these questions, not only to understand the legacy of the military regime but also to position, in both political and academic terms, the constellation of themes and thinkers encompassing

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Modernist Art in Ethiopia 24

contemporary Ethiopian art. Since it is almost impossible to cover the entire setting of contemporary art that has proliferated since the late 2000s, I chose to focus on artists and artists’ collectives that I believe have set new trends in artistic practice, taking into account the aesthetic, political, and philosophical questions foregrounded by Ethiopian modernism.

 I would like to emphasize that this book is only one articulation of Ethiopian modernism, not a total and inclusive account. It is intended to offer starting points for further research, rather than claiming to provide a set of definitive conclusions. The need for Ethiopian scholars to begin writing on Ethiopian art, both traditional and modern, is urgent if we are to place Ethiopian art history in proper perspective. Many extraordinary artists have emphasized a critical practice of art, while also addressing the aesthetic, political, and philosophical questions of Ethiopian modernism. Those who are not covered in this book include, among others, Tadesse Mesfin, Tebebe Terfa, Worku Mamo, Worku Goshu, Eshetu Tiruneh, Tadesse Belayneh, and Mezgebu Tessema. Much more should be done to investigate these broader artistic practices and subjectivities.

Chapter 1

Early to Mid-twentieth-century Modernism (1900–1957) and the Formation of the Fine Art School

interest was put to rest at the Battle of Adwa. One of the major challenges to colonial domination, Adwa disrupted the broader colonial imaginary. “Adwa,” said Andreas Eshete, “represent[ed] the rare, perhaps unique success of a poor, black country in defeating the imperialist ambitions of a European power.”1 A substantial engagement with Ethiopia by Europeans became necessary, since the victory revealed what could be called the reversal of classical colonial history. Ethiopia became a curious object of colonial knowledge and attained special importance. Many foreigners eagerly arrived in Ethiopia after the victory at Adwa; some were curious travelers, but the vast majority came as engineers and technicians to build roads, the railway, and the shipping line. As Richard Pankhurst noted, Adwa was “an anachronism in the era of the Scramble for Africa.”2 As artists and intellectuals dealt with the sensibilities of triumph that Adwa brought forth, modernism came into the core. Clearly, the social and cultural history after the victory at Adwa showed a marked and significant shift from preceding periods, and after Adwa, the encounter with modernity Italy’s colonial

Modernist Art in Ethiopia 26

anticipated novel optimisms. Artistic production radically shifted from previous practices of church art, and beyond that, new ideas and imaginations also affected different areas of artistic subjectivity and inquiry. Yet the ways in which artists took on the challenge to transform the legacies of religious art and, more importantly, their abilities to negotiate modernism in different forms are theorized in ways that categorize the art without recourse to the specific history and culture that circumscribes it. It is not the purpose of my book—nor is it even possible—to cover the wide and rich artistic range of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church that has evolved through centuries. Yet it is crucial to reposition modernism’s causalities and origins, in which the Orthodox Church played a central part, to make the extraction of early twentieth-century artists’ works real in modernism’s history. One of the most defining and profound features of early twentiethcentury modernism is the history of ideas that exchanged and deployed the values and ideals of modernity. If formalist analysis is also imperative in this, I argue it is in the critical consensus and interplay of visual and intellectual thought that we espouse a broader perspective of modernism’s genesis and its evolution in the 1940s and 1950s. Whereas visual modernism began with artists such as Belachew Yimer, the intellectual quest for the meaning of modernity broadly began with the writers of Berhanena Selam at the turn of the twentieth century. The early intellectuals’ obsession with the “modern,” or what historian Shimelis Bonsa reported as “their ambivalence and fear to the terror of modernity and their desire to stay true to the vernacular,”3 without doubt provides a better understanding of the affective consequences of the modern in the social thread and imaginary. In many respects, then, I also find it crucial to offer a new perspective about the notion of the public and its discursive site, from where, I argue, ideas about the modern also emerged. To understand why the utopian scheme of the “modern” was correspondingly mediated in popular discourse and imagery is, therefore, both pertinent and necessary. It is from these perspectives that I invoke a dialogic relationship between the sociocultural complexity of the early twentieth century and artistic modernism, beginning in 1900 and continuing until the establishment of the Fine Art School in 1957. The period was born, so to speak, into a panaroma of multiple, competing sites of politics, culture, and aesthetics. What is essential is a critical rereading of how the wider changes were negotiated, produced, and contested. Therefore, I am introducing a new

approach to understand the specific reasoning behind the central philosophical position of the time and its aesthetic implications. The Rise of Early Modernism in Context (1900–1957)

The founding of Addis Ababa as Ethiopia’s capital in 1881, the issuing of the country’s first national currency in 1894, and the releasing of postage stamps in the same year all affirmed Menelik II’s modern nation-building schemes even before the Battle of Adwa. Perhaps the most important technological project of this period was the execution of the Addis Ababa–Djibouti Railway, which was begun in 1894 under the auspices of Alfred Ilg, Menelik II’s Swiss technical adviser, and Ilg’s partner, French trader Charles Chefneux. The railway project ran into several political, financial, and technical difficulties and was not fully operational until 1915. But even before the railway’s completion, the port of Djibouti had become a route for trade from ports of the Indian Ocean such as Aden, Jeddah, and Bombay. Manufactured goods were shipped to the city, including paint and paintbrushes for artists. Alfred Ilg, who arrived in Ethiopia in 1879, would also become Menelik II’s personal photographer and is credited with introducing photography in Ethiopia. The advent of photography influenced the art of painting as well when portraits began to be painted from photographic images. Menelik II had also expanded his territory to the south through aggressive military expeditions, as he simultaneously promoted modern institutions and infrastructure. The last years of his reign saw a string of modern nation-building projects. The Bank of Abyssinia, an affiliate of the Britishowned National Bank of Egypt and the first bank in the country, was established in 1905, staffed by British personnel. The first modern school, Menelik II School, was opened in 1908, and Aemero, the first Amharic newspaper, and a state printing press were founded in 1911. The historical conditions of the early twentieth century were subsequently crucial to the rise of Ethiopian modernism. In the latter part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, religious paintings had also shifted from traditional conventions. But it was not until the beginning and the middle of the twentieth century that a marked development in artistic practice emerged in which artworks were partially, if not entirely, divorced from the traditions of Orthodox Church paintings. The victory at Adwa was consequently of great

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importance in Ethiopian modernism’s history. After Adwa, a renewed sense of pride and consciousness had positioned individual subjectivity, and the artist as subject sought to voice the ideals of gallantry and glory. Paintings of multiscene images, heroic battle scenes, and historical legends were primarily sold to the foreign market. As Richard Pankhurst noted: “The early years of the 20th century, which witnessed increasing numbers of visitors, many of them diplomats, also saw a corresponding increase in the supply of paintings on the market.”4 For instance, Pankhurst referred to the German diplomat Friederich Rosen, who arrived in Ethiopia in 1905 and obtained a painting depicting the Battle of Adwa. Pankhurst also stated that a market for local consumption had developed in the early part of the twentieth century and that one of the venues where artists sold their work were the tej bets (drinking houses). Notable artists of this time were Belachew Yimer, Tasso Habtewold, Yohannes Tessema, and Behailu Gebremaryam. I focus on Belachew’s work, although the works of Tasso, Yohannes, and Behailu are equally intriguing. Similar to religious paintings, these works generally renounced the European perspective and the illusion of volume and depth. The figures they depicted were arranged on flat surfaces and typically shown in static poses, with unnatural head and body proportions. This body of work demarcated a newfound consciousness in aesthetic practice. Artistic practice grew, paradoxically, with a European colonial imaginary that enthusiastically embraced this genre of artworks, not necessarily out of regard for their quality but as objects of curiosity. For instance, Friederich Rosen referred to the Battle of Adwa painting that he acquired in this way: “Despite its crude execution it has a certain cultural historical interest.”5 These works lacked the familiar features of European formalist renditions, but their classification should closely attend to material details, unique symbols and images in the composition, and the relationship to their own localities. There can be little doubt that these renditions were credible expressions of modern desires and of self-representational subjectivities. Artists had agency in their appeal to autonomy—in shaping their own executions, desires, and performativity. This autonomy embraced the tradition and values of the Orthodox Church, not as irreconcilably opposite but as part and parcel of modern subjectivity. The beginning of early Ethiopian modernism was a call for a new resonance of nationalism, and as such, nationalism as a cultural paradigm empowered the artist as subject to

surmise a new imagination that was expressed in new forms. Nevertheless, these works were regarded as ahistorical and reckoned as inferior derivatives of a long-gone European medieval past. It is impossible to unite two different historicizing processes that are divergent and that are each considered irredeemably discordant. These two histories—that of European modernism and that of its Other—have always intersected, and it is this traverse that is interesting to understand. Consequently, formalist analysis cannot compare the formal elements of early twentieth-century art to European formal elements from its own period, although deciphering the formal properties of these types of works is essential because such description would preserve the authenticity of the works. On many of these paintings, the artists’ names are inscribed at the bottom center of the canvases. Here, I should stress that church paintings were rarely signed: since creating such a painting was considered an act of piety, describing in pigment and line the narratives of the Gospel, it was considered inappropriate to individualize the faith with a signature. But the paintings of this new genre almost always have names inscribed, although dates are usually missing. Discussing this trend, Lanfranco Ricci’s Pittura Etiopica tradizionale (1996), a catalog that illustrated the collection of the Istituto Italo-Africano, stated, In a number of the paintings the artist is actually indicated through his signature on the canvass, a decidedly European innovation which had been so totally absorbed as in some cases to cause the artist to give only his initials, and in the Roman alphabet . . . on occasion indicative of the pervading influence from Europe . . . the artist first signs in Latin, and the Roman alphabet, and then in Ge’ez.6 Indeed, issues of early modernism can only be understood through the history that has framed Ethiopian church art. Rarely using the bodies of knowledge written in the Ethiopic script Ge’ez and embedded in the philosophies of the church by erudite Ethiopian church scholars, authorities such as Stanislaw Chojnacki (1915–2010) wrote widely on church art but barely understood its intrinsic meaning . They engaged in a reductionist Orientalist scholarship that diminished not only the interpretive metatexts of church art but also the manifestation of the art in modern practices. There is an immediate need to investigate the scholarship of church art

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Modernist Art in Ethiopia 30

because the initial articulation of modernism is firmly wedded to this same imaginary. Central to this stance, moreover, is an added concern for contemporary scholars’ complete reliance on existing scholarship, which draws its knowledge piecemeal from secondary sources. And the scholarship predominantly uses these sources to endorse the Orientalist invention of early practices of modern art. It is in this regard that I intend to provoke future research by citing limited examples to briefly reveal the ambiguities that have framed the scholarship of the art. But let me also clarify that when I introduce these examples, I am only pointing to larger, varied, and urgent queries that should be thoroughly interrogated. All of this calls for further substantive research that locates knowledge outside its hegemonic center, real or imagined. A Few Insights into the Orientalist Invention of Ethiopian Orthodox Church Art

The scholarship that has framed the art historical studies of church art has largely been organized by European travelers, chroniclers, and a few academics. But it was explored more expansively by Chojnacki, a Pole who traveled to Ethiopia as a librarian in the early 1960s. His scholarship is the primary text, an introductory account. It is important to note his tremendous contribution to the scholarship of church art; his meticulous recording of archival resources; his comprehensive formalist analysis; his collection of rare religious imagery that today embellishes the antiquities gallery of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies; and, most importantly, the volumes of documents that he wrote. These are all scholarly archives for further research pursuant to investigations of the genealogies of church art. Chojnacki’s work is primarily object-centered and largely engaged in an exhaustive investigation of iconographic themes. His foundational narrative is generally based on secondary sources from native informants and travelers’ documents. He lived in the country for over forty years, but he did not speak the working language, Amharic, and neither did he understand Ge’ez, the liturgical script. In fact, many who have written on Ethiopian church art do not speak or understand Ge’ez or Amharic. These include European academics such as Oto Jager, Eva Balicka-Witakwoska, Dorothea McEwan, and Elizabeth Biasio, as well as individuals who simply became interested in Ethiopia and its art. Among the latter groups are Paul

and Martha Henze and Ian Campbell, who are not trained art historians but whose writings on Ethiopian church art are widely read by both local and outside scholars. Perhaps because they do not understand the language, their research is completely directed to the physical and material analysis of the art rather than to its comprehensive meaning, that is, the theological, historical, cultural, and political context of the art. The Amharic language is full of puns, wit, and layered meanings. “Wax and Gold” is the most dominant form of poetic expression in this language, with the apparent figurative meaning being called the “Wax” and the hidden and significant meaning called the “Gold.” Essence and appearance are therefore fundamental. The Wax and Gold is prevalent in Amharic and is also ubiquitous in the Ge’ez script. It is also intrinsic to the images of church art. Its ontology is implied in the paintings but is often absent in the scholarly works about the art. Chojnacki’s primary work, Major Themes in Ethiopian Paintings (1983), particularly focused on proving the exclusive kinship of Ethiopian church art with European or Byzantine art; it did not highlight the configuration of the objects’ underlying meanings or the different treatises, upheavals, and polemics surrounding the theology of Orthodox Christianity that were frequently depicted in the paintings. What is also troubling is Chojnacki’s presumptions that Ethiopian painters always needed European inspiration to innovate and that the political, economic, and cultural climate of the country had little or no bearing on artistic production. Consequently, Chojnacki’s dominant claim throughout Major Themes was that Ethiopian artists always copied from a prototype and often from models imported from Europe—a declaration that suggested artists were oblivious to the political and cultural conditions of their lived experiences and to the integrity of their own skills and talents. For example, Chojnacki wrote: The religious and other attitudes of the Ethiopian painter remain always the same and his technique alters very little. It is true, nevertheless, that the forms and their stylistical expression have been evolving according to the models coming from abroad. In general, Ethiopian painting was affected by foreign influences in two ways. One was through an expatriate craftsman or artist who happened to live in Ethiopia and produced the paintings. The Ethiopians imitated his craft

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which thus brought about the changes in subject matter and style. We can point to a few instances of such influence by the expatriates. The one best documented by written records and paintings is the presence of European craftsmen in 15th century Ethiopia.7 Moreover, Chojnacki used several unwarranted assumptions to justify changes in iconographical themes that he generally concluded came from foreign sources. What is disconcerting in these postulations is the inferences’ precedence and bearing in the framing of Ethiopian art historical studies. Witness, for instance, the predisposition of a Venetian monk named Nicolo Brancaleon, who is widely referred to by scholars who work on Ethiopian church art simply because Chojnacki had imprudently deduced the merits of the monk’s works. According to an account by Francesco Suriano, who had visited Ethiopia in 1482, Brancaleon arrived in the country between 1480 and 1482.8 He is said to have lived in the country for forty years. Chojnacki wrote that Brancaleon influenced the styles of fifteenth-century paintings, and that Brancaleon’s images of the martyrdom of Saint George and the miracles of the Virgin Mary influenced styles and forms that remained popular until the eighteenth century. Brancaleon’s best-known painting, frequently mentioned by writers other than Chojnacki such as Willis Budge and Paul Henze, is a depiction of the Madonna and Child that decorated the Church of Atronsa Maryam and was ostensibly destroyed, along with the church, in a raid in 1704.9 Brancaleon is also known through the documents of Francisco Alvarez, a Portuguese missionary and explorer who went to Ethiopia as part of the Portuguese embassy in 1515. In his report entitled The Prester John of the Indies: A True Relation of the Lands of the Prester John of the Indies, Being the Narrative of the Portuguese Embassy to Ethiopia in 1520, Alvarez wrote of Brancaleon, “They say he was a monk before he came to this country.”10 Indeed, the details of Brancaleon’s life before his arrival in Ethiopia are not known. The Venetian archives do not say where and when he studied painting—or even if he was a painter at all. In his most comprehensive and well-regarded book, Church and State in Ethiopia: 1270–1527 (1972), Taddesse Tamerat engaged expansively with a large body of archives to give the period’s most comprehensive history up to that time. He discussed

the contributions, influences, and controversies of foreign travelers, artisans, diplomats, and missionaries without mentioning Nicolo Brancaleon’s name. Most significantly, Taddesse examined the integration of political ideology into the nation’s social and cultural texture, a subject that scholars such as Chojnacki have given little or no consideration in the analysis of church art. Certainly, scholars should acknowledge foreign influences on Ethiopian church art. But it is the association of specific historical events and political and religious ideologies with different trends in art that is critical, and scholars have given this only minimal attention. Chojnacki contended that Brancaleon had a substantial effect on Ethiopian paintings of the major themes and attributed to him profound influence over styles and forms in three uncertain and ambiguous works. “There are only three works in existence bearing Brancaleon’s signature to the best of my knowledge,” said Chojnacki, “and they are without any doubt the artist’s works.”11 The first of the three is a triptych that he found at the Addis Ababa souvenir and antique market in 1968, which he authenticated as Brancaleon’s work because of the inscription “Merkorios” on the back of the painting: this was said to be Brancaleon’s Ge’ez name. The second work is a diptych found in Gethesemane Church in eastern Gojam, of which Chojnacki said, “The artist’s signature appears on the back of both panels.”12 He later wrote that this painting was found four years after the first in the Addis Ababa souvenir and antique market, noting that much damage had been done to it, including an attempt at “erasing the artist’s signatures.”13 The third work is a booklet of miniatures discovered by the traveler Diana Spencer in 1973 at Wafa Iyäsus Church in Gwonca. Chojnacki wrote, “On the twentieth page at the foot of the scene of the Baptism of Christ, the artist’s signature is in evidence.”14 My question is not so much whether Brancaleon worked as a painter in Ethiopia or if he influenced Ethiopian art but rather what capacity he had as a painter to radically alter the artistic scene. There is no evidence that he had any prior painterly knowledge, certainly nothing sufficient to draw the conclusion that he had such a significant influence with just three obscure works. And yet even today, Brancaleon is mentioned in the humanities and social sciences disciplines, both inside and outside the country, as the European painter who revolutionized the church art of Ethiopia. For instance, Ian Campbell, who often has written on church art, acknowledged Brancaleon in the Journal of Ethiopian Studies, stating, “We are indebted

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to Professor Stanislaw Chojnacki for his review of what little information is presently available about the 15th–16th century painter, Nicolo Brancaleon. The publication of Chojnacki’s treatise which forms part of his seminal work Major Themes in Ethiopian Paintings constituted the third landmark event in the development of our knowledge of this enigmatic figure in the history of Ethiopian painting.”15 What is troubling, therefore, is the scholars’ unprecedented submission to this type of theory—a modern Orientalist authority that shows little regard for the knowledge of Ethiopian church artists and that lends the most convenient rationale for the beauty of non-Western church art. Since Ethiopian church art was frequently thought to be copied from Byzantium or influenced by European travelers, the scholarship virtually dismisses any notion of indigenous imagination in the art. Furthermore, it disregards the transformation of the art in modernist renditions, ultimately excluding such works from the larger history of modernism. And the assertion that European influences extended to all kinds of artistic forms and styles stemmed from the Europeans’ own deductions: indigenous scholars of the church were never consulted about these suppositions. It should also be underscored that local scholars were not indolent, nor were they passive spectators to European production, though they were constructed as such. On the contrary, local church scholars who were rigorously trained in famed centers of knowledge, such as Washera and Raguel, exercised critical agency from within the canon of Western knowledge, not by staying outside of it. Some of the prominent intellectuals of the twentieth century whom I examine in this book produced scholarly works that were rarely engaged by European scholars. They came out of this tradition. In one of the few critical works on the study of Ethiopian church art, Michelle Clifford argued that iconology should not only identify the subject matter of a pictorial motif but also examine the meaning and the tradition of the art. She stated, “An investigation of the relationship between Ethiopian culture and its art is enriched by an understanding of iconology. By investigating such factors as the politics of religion of Ethiopian history, the meaning of a particular motif in Christian Ethiopian art can be determined by the culture from which it develops. An understanding of these important factors may result in less misinterpretation by Chojnacki and other scholars.”16 In her study of the Annunciation, a popular theme in Ethiopian church painting that portrays the angel Gabriel’s announcement to the Virgin Mary

that she would conceive the Son of God, Clifford critiqued Chojnacki’s speculative claim. He had said Brancaleon influenced the style of painting in nine triptychs from the sixteenth century, since this scriptorium found in Tigre, in the northern part of Ethiopia, differed from previous depictions of the Annunciation. Chojnacki had written that it was Brancaleon who introduced this model. Clifford’s work showed gaps in comparative chronologies, as well as inconsistencies with or an absence of political and cultural histories. An extensive and critical look at the theme of the Annunciation, Clifford’s study emphasized the urgency to understand the religious, economic, political, and social histories of Ethiopia that are crucial factors in the analysis of iconography. These quandaries are limited signifiers as to how church art had been studied and disseminated, but equally disturbing is the larger scholarship of Ethiopian studies, the foundation of much of the local arts and cultural studies of the country. Ethiopian studies, which continues to minimize the contribution of learned church scholars, began as an ambiguous European project. As Richard Pankhurst observed: Ethiopian Studies, in a more modern sense, started outside the country, most notably with the work of the illustrious German scholar Hiob Ludolf. He was succeeded by [a] long line of European scholars, among them the Scottish “explorer” James Bruce, the German scientist Edouard Rüppell, the French brother-travelers Antoine and Arnauld d’Abbadie, and, in due course, by such savants as the Germans August Dillmann and Enno Littmann, the Italians Ignazio Guidi and Carlo Conti Rossini, and many others. Reference to these names, however, should not obscure the fact that behind them was a no less remarkable line of Ethiopian savants, who served as their informants, and without whom Ethiopian studies would have been infinitely the poorer. Among the first of such informants was Ludolf’s colleague Abba Gorgoreyos, and the venerable early nineteenth century Liq Atsqu of Gondar, who generously assisted so many visiting scholars from abroad.17 Europeans, therefore, emphatically overshadowed local scholars, who were mainly used as “native” informants. And this denigration of local scholars continues to shape the knowledge of Ethiopian studies. For instance,

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the Institute of Ethiopian Studies of Addis Ababa University, which is the primary repository for Ethiopian studies, refuses to hire indigenous church scholars to study its most valuable archive of centuries-old manuscripts, under the pretext that such erudition cannot be measured by European educational standards. Ethiopian studies has broadly been seen through the gaze of Europe and frequently analyzed with a “noble savage” approach, whereby scholars have affirmed the foundation myth of Ethiopian Christianity and archived the rest of its multicultural bases as “African” or “primitive.” To cite one example, the art historian Jules Leroy wrote about the physical features of the Ethopian when he said, “His complexion, his physical features, as much as his language and original culture, declare him to be a Semite, related to the Arabs. It is this fact that Ethiopia is first and foremost a Christian country that gives her this individual character and ensures her a special place among the black African nations.”18 Ethiopian studies writings are replete with narratives of Leroy’s type, despite the fact that non-Christian belief had always been part of Ethiopia’s history. With the exception of a few scholars such as Jacques Mercier, whose interpretation of ritual and symbol in Ethiopian healing art suggests new avenues of inquiry and interpretation about the nature of African influence on the art, many European researchers dismiss the validity of African consciousness and its relationship to Ethiopian bodies of knowledge. In his pivotal work, Art That Heals: The Image as Medicine in Ethiopia (1997), Mercier wrote: “Ethiopian material culture shares traits with other African cultures, while also being marked in some aspects by relations with the East (the Middle East and the Orient) and the West.”19 Further research should bring new insight to Ethiopian church art and its relationship to other African artistic practices, as well as the integration of these two fields of knowledge into one dialogue. Early Imagination of the Modern

The subject of the rise of Ethiopian modernism in the early part of the twentieth century cannot be broached without understanding the imagination of the modern at its inception, when the creation of new ideas and imaginations found expression in different areas of artistic subjectivity and inquiry. And it is vitally important to examine the significant shifts

in attitudes toward modern themes that refashioned modern lives, since such probing ultimately informs the conceptual premises of the visual arts. The period’s poetry, music, advertisements, and fashion provide telling evidence, all of which is key to understanding how modern concepts were woven into the social fabric and the imaginary. Precisely because of the essential role that such motifs played in shaping modern identities, it is imperative that we investigate how evocatively the notion of the modern was articulated in the language of desire through poetry, music, and advertising. This probing will without doubt provide a better understanding of how the modern was perceived at its inception. This type of investigation is particularly important because historians of Ethiopia have rarely considered the works of artists as part of intellectual history. On the few occasions when artists are mentioned in intellectuals’ work, they are simply identified as supplements to larger stories.20 According to linguist Baye Yimam, the term zämänay (or zäbänay), which means “modern,” is a state of “excessive arrogance—thus the proverbial expression Ebdena zemanay yelebun yenageral (Lunatics and zämänay speak their mind).21 A spontaneous individual, the zämänay has no fear and, like a lunatic, is restless, with the pleasure of desire unrestrained. Baye was noting the burden of arrogance that is embedded in the aspiration to be modern. Adwa’s legacy continued to reverberate, reinforcing a sense of exceptionalism in the ensuing decades. Menelik II died in 1913, but his modernization projects were uninterrupted through the regimes that followed. A sense of haughtiness became especially manifest during the early 1920s, although modern education did not construct the superiority of the modern over the nonmodern until the 1950s. A new elite, however, had just begun to appreciate everything about the modern world in the early twenties, and an attitude of arrogance was displayed in refined tastes in clothes, perfumes, automobiles, and jewelry, as well as other products that were imported from European countries such as Italy, France, and Switzerland. The most striking features of the modern appeared visually in advertisements and fashions in the newspaper Berhanena Selam. Though the word zäbänay was rarely used in the paper, it was nonetheless introduced in songs and poems of the 1920s to indicate finesse. The advertisement section of the paper suggested the rise of a unique, modern, and elite class of people who were snobbish and who drew from European aesthetics and fashion to shape the way the modern was understood.

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Figure 1.1a and b Advertisements for

a car and cognac in the newspaper Berhanena Selam.

Often promoting products that would appeal to the tastes of tujars (the rich and refined), this part of the paper offered an early modern lexicon of urbanity and sophistication. Tujars, who distinguished themselves from the rest of society, purchased the imported European goods that were advertised in Berhanena Selam. Among the products that graced the pages of the paper were “Campbell’s grand liquor, tested by doctors, produced in England and particularly in Scotland”; “Queen Anne Scotch Whiskey: Rare in Quality, Exquisite in Style”; “Gillette 24: Berkash waga ende baletsega (Cheap price for a rich man)”; “A. P. Marciano’s French Fiats”; “Eyasu Daniel’s Imported Capes and Suits for True Ladies and Gentlemen”; and “Wrigley Spearmint Gum to Chase Away Bad Breath” (Figure 1.1a and b). Trends in style, aesthetics, and culture that were intimately linked to ideas of modern identity framed the social world of the cultural elites. European clothes particularly gestured toward new individualities. Embodied identities of refined taste, status, and wealth revealed much of the modern experience that was informally tied to ideas of progress. And a stylish poise formed a key aspect, differentiating the modern from the nonmodern. Whereas the word arada, which I explain shortly, largely conveyed an understanding of the modern for people in the margins, zäbänay—in the sense of longing for elite taste—was also conjured in vernacular sonnets, circulated to reach vernacular audiences, and articulated in the language of desire. Expressions such as zäbänay nat eswa chamawa berkerk har new kemiswa (she is modern and refined, wearing only shoes with laces [imported] and fine silk [also imported]) were odes in which the desire to be zäbänay was also a central part of the ways in which the modern was

imagined and reproduced in everyday life among the nonelite. However, Baye’s interrogation of language through zäbänay goes far beyond an artificial fascination with and desire for European fashion and style. Zäbänay conjured new ways of thinking about what it meant to be modern, and in addition, the claim to the modern revealed the West’s early twentiethcentury economic and cultural penetration in numerous forms. Arada: The Locality of the Modern

In contrast with zäbänay, which implied a certain brand of elitism, arada suggested a popular culture—but a popular culture that was discriminatory in its sensitivity although uncensored and innovative in its quest for the novel. The arrogance of the few in the sensibility of zäbänay became the arrogance of many in the articulation of arada. The major city center of Addis Ababa that is now called Piazza (or Plaza or Square)—named after the Italian occupation—was called Arada in the early part of the twentieth century. A vast area in the middle of the city, Arada was the financial and cultural hub of Addis Ababa. Merchants and craftspeople were said to have given Arada its distinct flair, with wares that ranged from artwork to different types of oil and lambas (kerosene). Colorful Arada was also described as intriguing and all about elegance. Ladies who were naughty and mischievous, if only in their portrayal of audacity and daring, were part of Arada. As for the gentlemen, they reportedly mixed charm with sleekness, and they walked in style, invariably making sure that their panache separated them from their surroundings. Arada was not simply a name but also a sensibility. Poets and musicians employed the term as a symbol and image of renewal, an inauguration of a new experience. Arada filled the imagination of artists and became a metaphor to conceive of other worlds, a striving for hope, and a complicated passion for a projected future. Symbolic as it was, the word arada was transformed and translated into fantasies and desires, a coveting of the novelties and the vicarious experiences of the modern. The romance of Arada inspired many lyrics that were spontaneous yet conversational, simple and yet moving. Its constellation of poets and musicians introduced a new aesthetic. Arada became the language of the new subject’s dreams. In lines and rhymes such as the following, Arada projected a creative vision that imagined a new subjectivity.

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Yachi Yearada lej gud aderegechegn Cognac alechena kearre gatechegn. Oh that Aradan girl, she has really swindled me When I asked her for Cognac she made me drink kerare [a local brew] in its place. Ene eswan wodeje (aytal) eswa genzeb weda Endet tegenagen arada le arada I loved her but she loved money How did we find each other when we are both Aradans (when we are both sophisticated)? Arada was, therefore, responsible for having launched a new cultural metropolis that in turn marked the development of original practices in art. Indeed, artists such as Belachew Yimer catered to a foreign market in Arada, but works sold to foreigners equally reflected the changing conditions of the time. For the most part, the artwork that was produced consisted of similar themes, but even so, the artistic outburst that took place during this period, including the music and literary movements of the time, established the generation’s most profound legacy. It deeply influenced the generation of writers, musicians, and visual artists that followed. Even today, the word arada represents wit, sophistication, and urbanity. Current popular phrases in standard Amharic and Aradan vernacular, such as yearada lejoch yegebachew (children of Arada who really understand), are frequently used as points of resonance to urban incisiveness. The meaning of the word developed new but similar implications in the 1960s, when Ethiopian modernism made a momentous shift (as I discuss in chapter 2). The poetics of arada produced an art form that was as beautiful as it was powerful. It is essential to understand that this art form was profoundly rooted in the affective place and space of a new era, symbolized through the images of arada and expressed in a very personal way. It should be noted that the writers of Berhanena Selam, which I discuss in the section that pertains to print culture, used the word seletane (civilization) in their charged deliberations of progress and development and rarely used the word zemenawinet (modernity) or zäbänay (modern). The etymology of the word seletane, according to Kidanewold Kifle, is ewuket, mawek and kedenkurna merak, which mean “knowledge” or

“distance from ignorance.”22 Unlike zäbänay, which implied arrogance in clothes and tastes, and arada, which indicated an urbane sophistication with a claim to vernacular sensibility, seletane indicated the parlance of the modern intellectual. Belachew Yimer: An Aradan Artist

One prominent visual artist of the period who was a quintessential Aradan was Belachew Yimer. “[He] had a shop in Arada,” according to his grandson Gebre Kristos Solomon Belachew, “and all the other artists sold their works from there.”23 Born in Yetmbabo in the province of Gojam, Belachew was the first commercial artist in Ethiopia. His father, Fitawrari Yimer Goshu, was an official at the royal court of Tekle Haimanot and governor of an area in the Gojam region. Belachew was only two years old when Menelik II defeated the Italians at Adwa and nineteen years old when Menelik II died in 1913. A product of Menelik II’s modern nation-building project, he spent his youth in Arada and sold his works to foreigners, who were his major clients—so much so that Hermann Norden called him “Abyssinia’s only artist.”24 Belachew was also mentioned in foreign publications, such as K. Lubinski’s book of photographs entitled A Honeymoon to Abyssinia (1930)25 and a 1935 issue of National Geographic.26 Besides being known for his several renditions of the grander themes of the nation, including the legend of the Queen of Sheba as directly conceived from the Kebra Nagast27 or the Glory of the Kings, the Battle of Adwa, and an interpretation of “Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Her Hands unto God” for the modern Parliament, Belachew produced several hunting scenes and depictions of everyday lives. He also did portraits, among which were the portraits of Emperor Hirohito of Japan, who ascended to the throne in 1927, and Kemal Atatürk of Turkey. The radical revisions of the Ottoman state system under Mustafa Kemal Pasha, better known as Atatürk, were widely talked about by the intellectuals of Berhanena Selam, who applauded Atatürk’s effort to abandon the sacred law of Islam in favor of the Swiss civil code. Emperor Hirohito’s painting was commissioned by the Japanese Embassy in Ethiopia, but just what inspired Belachew to paint Atatürk is not known; perhaps it was the leader’s popularity among intellectuals that compelled the artist’s vision. Many of Belachew’s paintings have found their way to Europe and now reside in ethnographic museums in Bremen, Zurich, Geneva, and

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Munich. “After the liberation,” said Richard Pankhurst, “Belachew gained considerable popularity among the Allied troops.”28 George Sandwith, an Australian soldier who met Belachew in 1941 after the liberation, wrote a letter to Pankhurst about the artist and his paintings. Referring to Belachew as “a most distinguished looking man,”29 Sandwith told Pankhurst of an exhibition he arranged in Harar where Belachew’s paintings “caused considerable interest and controversy among the British troops in Ethiopia in 1941.”30 And in this letter, Sandwith referred to the paintings “as strange to relate.”31 Belachew’s work primarily used history and memory as sources to narrate the grandeur and glory of the nation. Europeans collected his work for its paradigmatic difference from European culture and for its absolute Otherness. Paradoxically, the nation that he depicted in many of his works was formed as the Other even as the works simultaneously deconstructed the Other. Along with the Aradan sensibility of the modern, therefore, one must talk about the imaginary of the nation in the construction of the modern, a topic that I discuss when I examine the Berhanena Selam writers. The nation, which could be read as both human through its subjects and divine through the monarchal state, articulated a double meaning as both a representation of subjectivist sight and a nonrepresentational nonsubjectivist vision. A real phenomenon that cannot be understood as false or unreal, the imaginary of the nation was an authentic experience among cultural producers. The modern history of Ethiopia cannot be understood without this source of identification. The nature and parameters of modernism in countries such as Ethiopia can only be grasped if examined through identifiable historical conditions that stimulated changes in artistic practice. And it was particularly after the Battle of Adwa that artists and writers produced works that manifested this national consciousness in an imaginative and original style. Belachew Yimer did just that. A close reading of his paintings is subsequently necessary to capture the distinct identity of his work. Belachew Yimer’s Battle of Adwa

Belachew’s depiction of Adwa (Figure 1.2) is painted on canvas with oil. It is rendered with lush reds that are immediately visible and with tints of green and brown that subtly blend inside the reds. In this work, there is a careful selection of events, European belief in its inchoateness notwithstanding.

Figure 1.2 Belachew Yimer. Battle of Adwa. Date unknown. 179 × 88 cm. Oil on

canvas. Courtesy of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies.

The artist depicts the Empress Taitu Betul (1861–1918) dressed in an elegant blue cape and with a red umbrella over her head. The umbrella signifies the rank and stature of the person. Known for her tough stand against the Italians, Taitu Betul is an icon for African feminists. She played a pivotal role in the conflict over the Treaty of Wuchale, after inconsistent interpretations of the accord led to the final conflict with Italy. Taitu Betul marched alongside her husband, Menelik II, to the Battle of Adwa. Many artists have painted her, and others such as Agegenhu Engida have written about her.32 In Belachew’s painting, she is seen marching with grace in front of her husband, who trails behind her with the red, green, and yellow Ethiopian flag draped around his neck; he is wearing a red cape and has a red umbrella over his head. The Italian army is portrayed in profile, lined up at the right side of the canvas. Since early twentieth-century painters such as Belachew first learned their art from the tradition of Orthodox Church paintings, their compositions adhered to the broader conventions of church painting. The visual representation of eyes in church iconography suggests the ambiguities of good and evil. Always positioned symmetrically in relation to the composition’s vertical or horizontal alignment, good persons are represented with two visible eyes whereas evil persons are painted in profile, with just one eye revealed. A large part of Belachew’s canvas shows the Ethiopian army. With their facial features fully visible, they are seen slaying the enemy in

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full force, but they are directly confronting and leaning into the viewer’s gaze rather than looking at the enemy they are battling. This type of depiction amused many Europeans, who wrote about the “comical” nature of these paintings. Yet the artist wanted to portray the dreadful nature of the enemy through the symbolic attributes of his culture. And precisely because of these sensitivities, it is most important to read these paintings in their inimitability and against conventional Western views. Slaughtered Italian bodies are lying all over, but no Ethiopian body is in view. Italian soldiers are also fleeing the scene. Three Ethiopian flags are waving on the left side of the canvas, resilient and overwhelmingly attractive. The fact that one was painted with the effigy of the Lion of Judah reveals the unconventional history of the artist’s Ethiopia. On the right side of the painting, the same number of Italian flags are seen, two held by fleeing soldiers, and one flag holder looks like he is going to fall down along with his banner. Their half faces are portrayed with protruding eyes. They look like outlaws whose dreams of fortune have been shockingly disrupted. There is a participatory relationship between the viewer and the painting. With too many figures to fathom, the observer’s eyes continuously move, watching and responding to each scene in order to finally own the story. Chaotic yet coherent, the battle scene invigorates a chilling sensation of joy. In the distance, in the middle of the canvas, Saint George is seen on a white horse, saving Brutawit from the dragon that symbolizes evil.33 Saint George, whose feast is celebrated on the first day of March—the same day the battle was won at Adwa—also symbolizes the battle victory. With a presentation so focused on cultural metaphors, it is impossible to separate the painting’s thrilling emotional vigor from its materiality. Principally a narrative of an unprecedented historical epoch, Belachew’s painting of the Battle of Adwa is a story of freedom and fervent commitment to nationalism. As rousing as the work is, however, a contemporary reading of the painting reveals disturbing notions of race in its figurative depictions. Ethiopian faces are painted in white and black; the white color is used to portray soldiers and the nobility, whereas the black color represents servants and all other ancillary staff. It should be noted that even when Adwa symbolically reinvented the claims and rights of Africans in the New World, Ethiopia was engaged in slave trade and exported slaves to destinations such as Aden and Bombay in return for manufactured goods that were transported to Addis Ababa from different locations of the

Indian Ocean. Slaves were also part of the Ethiopian nobility’s domestic households and were traded and sold by their owners. The painting reveals the categories of black and white that were rooted in Ethiopian society but routinely ignored in Ethiopian and African imaginations of Adwa. Belachew’s imagery was not racially mitigated in a purposeful way. The intellectual vigor of the time did not see the hierarchical positioning of race as an anomaly. For Belachew, the conceptions of race and its troublesome complications in Ethiopian society were not issues of critical concern, but a contemporary reading of his painting exposes Adwa’s ambiguous legacy. The sharp contrast of colors—between Ethiopians painted in white and their black servants—was perhaps due to the absence of a reconciliatory tone. Black-colored Ethiopians are densely lined up behind the major personalities of the war, only recognizable by their black hairdos and by the blotches of black underneath their hair. According to grandson Gebre Kristos Solomon Belachew, the artist used silt from a kerosene lamp (kuraz) for black paint in the early part of his career, until Arab merchants arrived with black powder,34 which was then mixed with oil and gas. The construction of the railway line to Djibouti in the middle of the twentieth century opened up the ports that connected Addis Ababa to the world of the Indian Ocean. It was then that commodities began to reach the city in significant quantities, and an assortment of brushes and paints also arrived during this time. Belachew’s later portrait of Japanese emperor Hirohito shows a significant shift in shades and hues. Although a contemporary reading may reveal problematic aspects in the work, Belachew’s painting had its own aesthetic flavor. Painted on a flat surface, it renounced illusion and depth. However, its expressionistic brushstrokes exaggerated cultural metaphors, and one sees a passion in both the painting and the painter. Belachew did not pretend to mimic European modernism’s sensibilities. Nor did his work center on childish, chaotic, and naive interpretations of his own irrationality. His work instead insisted on being acknowledged for its own geography, memories, culture, and history. Depictions of the legend of Solomon and Sheba or the Battle of Adwa are nowadays abundant in curio markets as souvenir items, freshly invented with additional marketable themes, but I would argue that Belachew’s early twentieth-century renditions had a unique style. Radically different from the church paintings of the period, their form and style were innovative for

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the time. As an Aradan artist, Belachew brought forth the imaginary bond between nation and citizen through the dramatization of both the Battle of Adwa and the Solomon and Sheba story. And this was at a time when nationalism was not only the primary source of loyalty and solidarity but also the rallying image in the discourse of modernity. Adwa raised the sublime figure of the nation in an expression that had visual, tactile, sensuous, and emotional dimensions. When the analogy of the nation and the divine was spoken, with all of its validity, Belachew shared the sensibilities and desires of his Aradan counterparts; they were proud of what their Ethiopian heritage had provided through Adwa’s legacy, but they also believed they were part of the modern world and eagerly sought its promises. Berhanena Selam (1925–35): Print Culture and the Early Imagination of the Modern

Menelik II died after a long illness. He had chosen his grandson Iyasu as heir to the throne, but Iyasu quickly lost support because of his Muslim ties. He was deposed in 1916, and Menelik’s daughter Zewditu (1876–1930) became empress. Zewditu’s cousin Tefferi Mekonnen—who would become Emperor Haile Selassie I in 1931—was made regent and successor to the throne. The legacy of Menelik’s modern nation-building project continued through the 1920s and 1930s. Particularly during Tefferi Mekonnen’s regency, emphasis was given to modern education, and the crown prince himself traveled to Europe in 1924 to learn about European schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure. Ethiopia was also admitted to the League of Nations in 1923, when the crown prince agreed to abolish slavery in the country. Established in 1925, Berhanena Selam, whose name meant “Light and Peace,” was a weekly newspaper founded by Crown Prince Tefferi Mekonnen. The first Amharic newspaper, Aemero, was launched in 1911, but it was not until 1925, when Berhanena Selam was established, that a vibrant intellectual culture emerged. The intellectuals of the time were members of the nobility, ministers in the imperial cabinet, military chiefs, prominent clergymen, and a few Western-educated elites who worked in government bureaucracies. And these were the individuals who ultimately enacted the policies and decisions of the state. Artists of the 1920s, such as Belachew, centered their work on the period’s debates and exchanges; they themselves were products of the intellectual history of the period. It was also around

this time that artists such as Agegenhu Engida and Abebe Wolde Giorgis (1897–1967) were sent abroad for art education. On the first page of each issue of Berhanena Selam, these words appeared: “The government of Ethiopia’s Crown Prince, Prince Tefferi Mekonnen, strives to bring light and peace to his country and hence he named this newspaper ‘Berhanena Selam’” (translation mine). The paper published its first issue in January 1925, opening with the following statement: Light is contrary to dark and peace is contrary to hostility. And we the people of Ethiopia are always greeted with the warmth of sunshine, a weather condition that we have been endowed with. The light of Jesus Christ should also shine in our soul. I came to the earth as light. Whoever believes in me should not live in darkness, said he. Just as his saying, one needs the brightness of light to reach civilization. All who are members of the Ethiopian government nobility, do your best to struggle and strive for modern education, even if you have to use your own financial resources to bring this light of civilization to your country. If you struggle to achieve this goal, we will realize the civilization of light and peace. The darkness of ignorance and hostility will always threaten our peace. (Translation mine)35 When scrutinizing the contributions of the thinkers of Berhanena Selam, historians of Ethiopia have long been interested in the dialogue between these writers and leaders in the modern economic, administrative, and educational spheres. That is without doubt a key factor, but one should also consider the constructed divide between the West and the non-West and how the Berhanena Selam writers perceived such divisions. Despite their history of not being colonized, how did they apprehend an alterity that excluded them from its discourse? And when they sought seletane, what were its defining features? Because these central queries continue to challenge the progress of intellectual thought, I return to them throughout the course of this book. The values and ideals of modernity, which intellectuals questioned, exchanged, and deployed at various points in the country’s history, were an integral part of Ethiopian modernism’s history. Artists, much like intellectuals, negotiated local, national, and transnational ideas and cultures.

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Berhanena Selam consisted of several sections and covered, among many topics, debates between intellectuals on pertinent issues of the time, including modern education, modern infrastructure, and technologies. Readers responded to the articles they read in the “Letters to the Editor” section, and the writers might, in turn, continue their arguments in a section called Leteyake melash (Response to the questions). There were news items from overseas; quotations from European philosophers and writers, ranging from Aristotle to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Honoré de Balzac; and an advertisement page that marketed imported European goods such as cars, clothes, whiskeys, and cognacs. Here, I would point out that the intellectuals of Berhanena Selam were not a homogenous group. They did not have a unified or collective vision of seletane, of what the West or modernity meant, or of how modernity should be encountered. But clearly, their notions of seletane reflected the ideas behind the progress and development of Europe. In other words, these pioneering intellectuals undoubtedly recognized and emphatically wrote on the essence and benefits of the progress that had ripened in Europe. Centering on two distinctive spheres, the material and the spiritual, most intellectuals of Berhanena Selam deliberated on material that revered Western civilization, on Ethiopia’s peripheral position relative to that domain, and on the monarchy’s invocation of the spiritual realm to overcome feelings of uncertainty and anxiety that this excluded condition provoked. Their allegiance to imperial power intact, the intellectuals’ engagement with seletane was therefore rooted in a genuine hope that progress and development could be extracted from the monopoly of the West and that Ethiopia could become an equal participant in the community of the modern world. For instance, in an article entitled “Knowledge, Work Ethic and Busness,” Feleke Wolde Hanna stated: Our country Ethiopia, holy and the land of paradise, originated from ancient Solomon and David, and her great leaders are bestowed with this lineage. Ever since Menelik I until our time, even though she is backward in the area of civilization and even though her eyes are not used to seeing the road of light, when her ancient power should have sustained her, she has instead become less powerful, which has caused major

injuries and sadness to her children. The major thing to be realized is that she has never compromised her freedom and sovereignty. She has survived because of the valor of her emperors, martyrs and heroes who have through history protected their country. [Although] we are proud of her independence and freedom, we have been hindered from seeing the light of civilization. Our respected country should train her children in advanced agriculture and also in business. The Ethiopian nobility who have seen European civilization should take the responsibility to educate Ethiopians, to send them abroad for further education and bring in the light of civilization to their country. (Translation mine)36 Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the writings in Berhanena Selam was that, in imagining a nation replete with exceptionalism, they simultaneously reduced sentiments of Otherness even as they exacerbated a perennial anxiety about Otherness. Put differently, intellectuals primarily saw Ethiopia as a chosen nation, but they also expressed deep doubts over the conditions that were decisive in the making of seletane. The thinking of the Berhanena Selam writers could be encapsulated as a belief founded in an irreducible monarchal patriarchy in which the ruler, by his exemplary moral and divine qualities, expressed the collective will of the nation’s seletane. As an example, upon the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie in January 1931, crowned as “His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings of Ethiopia and Elect of God,” the writers discussed the cosmic imperative of the monarchy and its mystic moral quest that was so critical to the existential survival of the nation. In particular, one said, “This respected grand coronation is told by David himself as a prophecy. God has given hope for Ethiopia that government would always be there and this is exemplified by Menelik I to Menelik II and now we see that Ethiopia is bestowed with the benevolence of Emperor Haile Selassie I” (translation mine).37 Modern self-consciousness derived from a utopian view of the monarch who descended from Menelik I, the son of Sheba and Solomon, as a repository of reason. Again, the coronation of the emperor was commemorated in dramatic language:

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Ethiopia had always been a diamond but nevertheless she was a concealed diamond. This curtain that had always covered her face had alienated her from the rest of the world. This curtain prevented the coming of light into the country. This curtain was first opened by Emperor Menelik II but nevertheless the curtain was not fully opened and therefore the entry of civilization was scanty. Because of God’s will, Emperor Haile Selassie had been bestowed by God to the country and he has opened the curtain fully and hence sunshine and light in the country. Ethiopia and Europe have come together because of one man. This type of man and government, we have never had and will be hard to find in the future. (Translation mine)38 A major theme for early twentieth-century artists and intellectuals, the nation was approached as an abstract and sublime ideal, not only through myths that performed as objective truths but also through unifying historical events and legends. Belachew Yimer’s Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Her Hands unto God, the Battle of Adwa, and the Legend of Solomon and Sheba were all about historical imaginaries of the modern nation in expressions that had sensuous and emotive features and that also presented the nation as the primary form of modern identity. Balay Yohannes painted the Lion of Judah,39 Tadla from Addi painted Emperor Yohannes,40 and Behailu Gebremaryam painted hunting scenes, but their compositions were adorned with the symbolical attributes of the nation, such as the nation’s flag, and war accessories, such as the shield and sword that signified heroism. The interwoven perceptions of monarchy, nationalism, and seletane propagated hierarchy as it sought democracy and mysticism as it promoted pragmatism. Intellectuals firmly believed that Ethiopia was a chosen nation, that its divine rulers exemplified such a stance, and that this was the primary reason why the country escaped the colonial venture. By the 1960s, a complicated perception of the nation would emerge in intellectual thought and artistic practice, as I discuss in chapter 2. But up until the Italian occupation of 1936, the complex ways in which the individual experienced a sense of attachment to the nation were tantamount to the construction of social identity. This imaginary bonding between nation and citizen, as I have described in Belachew Yimer’s works, was also reflected in artistic identity.

What makes Berhanena Selam especially interesting was the intellectuals’ broader attempt to achieve an organic unity between the political, cultural, moral, and social spheres, a unity they believed depended upon the imperial institution and ideology. The irony is that the state made effective use of this narrative to expand its own powers, even as the intelligentsia robbed itself of an appropriate reckoning of the modern. At stake was the question of whose seletane or whose terms would dominate the values, forms, ideologies, and histories associated with the modern nation. I seek to go beyond a simplistic understanding of the Berhanena Selam intellectuals and visual artists of the time as a homogenous group and as mere tools of the state who enhanced a fictitious narrative of the divine nation. Rather, I argue that intellectuals and artists assumed the divinity to be real, objectively definable, and desirable. Progress only meant the movement of science and industry; it was not supposed to tamper with the grace of the divine nation and its benevolent monarch. Despite the grim political context of imperial power and pageantry, the writers of Berhanena Selam, together with artists of the time, saw monarchy and seletane as complementary and as functioning dialogically. Indeed, the question of how Ethiopia could be equal to Europe dominated the writings of the intellectuals as much as the probing of Otherness did. Fitawrari Deressa Amente, who was one of the paper’s most prominent writers and who periodically wrote about backward thoughts that impeded progress and development, addressed the importance of modern education, the vices of alcohol, and the significance of modern technologies, among many other topics. By contrast, Hakim Workeneh Eshete, the first director of the Tefferi Mekonnen Elementary School, often wrote about sovereignty, which he believed was intertwined with seletane. In his speech on the inauguration of the school, published in the newspaper, Workeneh said the following: Many years ago, Ethiopians were civilized in accordance with the time. Nevertheless, as time went on, we went backward, and today we are in line with all the backward people of the world. Backward means being behind in education, knowledge, wealth and power. Because of this backwardness, we are not getting the respect that we deserve from other nations. It is also threatening our sovereignty. Our people

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who do not know the history of the world, nor the laws of nature, think they can continue living like they had done for the last 300 years, and that other nations have not noticed or do not care how they live. I can assure you that this is a big misconception on our part. If you ask me why, I can tell you this is because it is the law of nature. No people stay unchanged. Either people go forward or they go backward. If people go backward, they will be subsumed by people who are far advanced. (Translation mine)41 Workeneh was adopted by a British citizen named Charles Martin and went to the United Kingdom at a young age. He returned to Ethiopia as a medical doctor and was one of the pioneering intellectuals of his time. Deressa and Workeneh insisted that a new and rigorous synthesis was needed to tackle the economic hegemonies of Europe— and in Workeneh’s case, the urgent need to counter Europe’s material domination—if Ethiopia was to maintain its sovereignty. At a time when colonialism had its grip on the African continent, the fear of losing sovereignty dominated intellectual thought, despite the exceptionalist narrative that pervaded Berhanena Selam. Both Workeneh and Deressa often cited the massive industrialization and modernization of early twentieth-century Japan as a potential model for overcoming European economic supremacy. They believed that the reason for Japan’s success was its citizens’ diligence in acquiring knowledge through modern education. In this regard, Fitawrari Deressa Amente wrote: “Japan followed countries who had been modernized and civilized to achieve its own civilization in fifty short years. The people of Japan exerted all their power on the education of civilization and because of this fact, the people of Japan were able to benefit themselves and benefit their country’s civilization and sovereignty”42 (translation mine). Given this background, several fundamental queries must be posed. Did the intellectuals of Berhanena Selam consider the global organization of seletane that they sought to appropriate from Europe? How much had they considered the political ideologies behind Europe’s seletane? And was the truth in which Otherness had emerged and been deployed understood? The promises of European seletane or civilization that the writers of Berhanena Selam deliberated upon had always been interwoven with the hegemonic political economy of capitalist modernity, albeit with different

forms and trajectories—colonialism, imperialism, and neocolonialism, all part of the genealogies of modernity that have shaped the evolution of both Western and non-Western modernities. And promises of modernization or seletane, which were considered synonymous by the Berhanena Selam intellectuals, had always been woven into the larger political ideologies of modernity. However, for these intellectuals, seletane simply meant freeing the nation from ignorance, and as they understood it, that entailed incorporating Western knowledge, innovations, and sensibilities. Indeed, the broader discursive field of Otherness was disguised by the obsession to change traditional cultures and beliefs, which were thought to have blocked technology and development. Though writers used the word seletane, I interrogate their perception of the term through the historical and political consciousness of modernity and the questions it raises in Ethiopian cultural claims, thus using the concept of seletane interchangeably with the larger politics of capitalist modernity. This is particularly salient because the debates surrounding seletane also produced historical and cultural conditions that made the modernisms of the 1920s and early 1930s both necessary and possible. Here, it is also crucial to understand the precise nature of the interaction between intellectuals and the public, a topic that the period’s general intellectual history does not address. Scholars have routinely focused on what are generally considered official documentations. And often, the various manifestations of confirmation or dissidence that indirectly influenced the political and social topographies were largely ignored. Who comprised the public that the writers of Berhanena Selam addressed? And did the norms and institutions of the intellectuals dominate and displace the histories and experiences of the larger public? The principal assumption is that print culture appeals to a defined audience. Whom, then, did the paper reach? Clearly, the subscription price, seven Ethiopian birr a year, was unaffordable for many Ethiopians. Furthermore, given the low literacy level of the larger public, we must question the scale of the debate about seletane and the number of people the debate sought to engage. In this regard, it is vital to consider the points of convergence between the active and passive voices—between the intellectuals and the larger public—in patronage and epistemologies within the frameworks of larger interpretive issues of seletane. Although there is no clear answer as to the precise nature of audience relations, I have more broadly found the notion of the public implicated

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in diverging and implicit ways. My argument, of course, depends in significant part on the unofficial means used by ordinary people to negotiate the political, cultural, and social landscape. Focusing on the public that the intellectuals spoke of, I classify this notion into two categories in order to understand the cultural and political ideas of the twentieth century: the reading public and the watching public. The reading public comprised the nobility and the intellectuals who formed the ideological foundations of seletane. The watching public was produced, marked, and shaped by the historical contexts and facts that the reading public constructed. However, I also want to suggest the two publics were mutually constitutive as well as transactional and that such a crucial relationship ultimately fostered a Gramscian hegemonic equilibrium of substituted encounters of coercion and consensus that clearly bridged the defined hierarchy between these two publics. Among the persistent themes discussed in Berhanena Selam was the notion of change that was collectively affected in the consciousness of many people. The case should be made, then, though the larger public was not informed about the variegated issues of seletane that were deliberated in Berhanena Selam, that the lure of the discursive projects of change ushered an embrace to seletane and the promises that seletane held. Though the reading public broadly constructed the attitudes of the watching public, one can additionally discern (albeit obliquely) that the basis of arguments also included the voices of the watching public. And despite the ideological discourse and cultural expressions of seletane that intellectuals attempted to impose on the watching public, the consciousness of seletane was often negotiated. The very attempt of the reading public to translate the multiple possibilities of seletane to the watching public required the accommodation of popular sentiments. For instance, one popular theme in Berhanena Selam was the patriotic sentiment of hager fikir (love of country). This emotion was pervasively deliberated to primarily legitimate the ideologies of seletane in the popular imagination. Singling out, among others, the means of protecting a sovereignty that was increasingly exposed to the rapid aggression of colonialism, intellectuals urged the unequaled authority of seletane to sustain sovereignty. And most connected to the ideas of seletane and sovereignty were perceptions of national pride and identity. The patriotic feeling of hager fikir consequently spoke to and was also a voice for those who were sidelined in the larger intellectual debates

over seletane. Attitudes to hager fikir encouraged resistance to the 1936 Italian invasion. The Hager Fikir Mahber (the Association for Love of Country) was established in 1935 to withstand the impending invasion by Italian Fascists. In this way, the project of seletane reluctantly embraced the anxieties and resentments of the watching public to domesticate it to seletane’s major cultural narratives. I am therefore calling into question the complexities by which notions of change were formed and shaped from multiple sites. I believe a more critical understanding of the voices of the subaltern—the watching public—and the ways in which the subaltern has been positioned is important, since it implicitly influenced the discourse of seletane. Indeed, the notion of the subaltern and its influence or lack thereof on the power nexus has been extensively debated since the early 1990s by scholars—for example, by Gayatri Spivak in Can the Subaltern Speak? (2008). In this work, Spivak argued that the fear of power had long kept the subaltern silent. Of course, Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, a collection of essays written between 1929 and 1935, defined the subaltern as workers and peasants who were oppressed by the Italian National Fascist Party. But Gramsci was also interested in studying the consciousness and culture of the subaltern. Acknowledging that the subaltern was not an active participant in the making of history, Gramsci encouraged us to study the active and passive association of the subaltern to the dominant group and the subaltern’s effort to influence the hegemonic discourse. It is in the Gramscian way that I would like to decipher the relationship between the reading and watching publics and how the claims to seletane also encompassed the voice and agency of the watching public. For their part, the writers of Berhanena Selam lived among the greater community largely because the founding of Addis Ababa was based on an urban structure called sefers (neighborhoods). When Menelik II moved his capital from Entoto to Addis Ababa, he allocated land to members of the nobility (who were also often cabinet ministers, diplomats, and other dignitaries), military chiefs, and the clergy. As architect Fasil Ghiorgis noted: The earlier settlements were based on existing feudal and military style . . . camps, where the dignitary of a region settled on top of a hill and administered his sefer. A sefer is an area similar to a military settlement or camp, with a buffer zone

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in between. These village-like settlements or camps were separated by natural boundaries, such as rivers and steep slopes. The main inhabitants of any one particular sefer were soldiers, priests and civil servants, who were related or acquainted to the dignitary of that particular sefer. In those days, one had to traverse steep slopes, streams and winding paths to go from one sefer to the other. Thus, the structure of Addis Ababa was that of a multi-centered semi-rural settlement.43 Within this context of settlement, the voices of the intellectuals of Berhanena Selam were linked to the community of sefers and to the community’s aspirations for social change. At the heart of my argument ultimately is the inevitable dialogic conditions between the common people and the chiefs of the sefers, that is, between the reading and watching publics. I argue that at a minimum, the lived cultural experiences that connect these two publics, such as religious festivals, weddings, and funerals, brought forth affective relational social practices that in turn informed the types of change that intellectuals pursued. I believe intellectuals were pressured to selectively negotiate the relational aspects of social life. This is evident in many of the writings of Berhanena Selam, in which some of the anxieties of the watching public were deliberated within the metanarratives of seletane. For instance, Tewolde Berhan Medhin repeatedly wrote on the nature of government and how the state should acknowledge the voices from below. In an article called “Sele meretena sele ehel” (About land and about crop), Negdras Beshah wrote that land was not used appropriately and that the nobility was holding large portions of land without creating employment.44 And in the section of the newspaper called “Yeketema wore” (What the city says), several writers expressed their concerns on the vices of alcohol, the vagaries of unemployment, and problems of sanitation, which one assumes rose from a demand mustered by the community of sefers. It is also in “Yeketema wore” that the voices of the subaltern were often raised in combative ways. To cite one instance, in an issue that pertained to stray dogs in the city, the writer referred to a public that did not comprehend the health hazard posed by stray dogs, stating: “People are complicating the simple issues of health that we genuinely presented to the public by

saying and again today [emphasis mine], state officials want to destroy our dogs who protect us from bandits and thieves.”45 The phrase and again today seems to signify the apprehensions about the behavior of the public and its agency that were causing pressure. Simply put, the voices of the Other played a role in shaping the ideas and perspectives of the writers of Berhanena Selam. But the specific ways in which ideas related to ordinary lives have rarely been identified or acknowledged by intellectual historians. All these implications about the notion of the public are gathered from media outside the visual arts. How can we then implicate the same argument to the visual arts? Here, it should be noted that the visual arts were rarely engaged by writers from the period except for a few sketches and illustrations that served as visual metaphors for social and political issues. But the audience for early twentieth-century visual arts was extensively documented by Richard Pankhurst in Some Notes for a History of Ethiopian Secular Art, which he primarily credited to foreign collectors and in some cases to the tej bets or drinking houses. Certainly, there is no evidence of local collectors apart from the portraits of members of the royalty that were commissioned by the family or works such as that depicting the legend of Solomon and Sheba that were commissioned by the state. And it was not until 1931 that the first modern art exhibition was held. Organized by the French weekly newspaper in Addis Ababa, Le Courrier d’Éthiopie,46 the exhibition displayed the works of twenty painters, of whom only one was Ethiopian. He was Agegenhu Engida, whom I discuss later in this chapter. According to historian Shiferaw Bekele, “The organizers were gratified at the turnout of viewers.”47 But if the show rallied many attendees, no objective evidence was provided about the types of viewers or their response to the exhibition. Even before this event, the intellectual posture toward the visual arts was all but excluded from the passionately debated cultural topics of the period. And it was not until the 1954 showing of the work of Afework (also spelled Afewerk) Tekle (1932–2012)—held at the city hall and opened by Emperor Haile Selassie—that a second exhibition was held. Were artists, then, a reading public? Or were they simply a watching public? Even if the visual arts of the period were overlooked in most of the cultural debates, I argue they were not insignificant. Similar to the intellectuals, the visual artists were formed in the tradition and scholarship of the church. They read the articles in Berhanena Selam or were part of the writing movement behind the newspaper. Even

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though audiences did not observe and engage with their paintings in designated spaces such as galleries, their art was produced to articulate the conception of seletane, similar to theater, music, literature, and poetry. Fueled by factors such as the urgency to modernize, the most influential artists of the period, including Belachew Yimer, shaped collective values associated with new forms of modern desires and sensibilities. They were the reading public whose images provided a clear pattern of communication with the larger discourse of seletane and whose presence validated the character and experience of seletane. I would underscore the fact that the writers at Berhanena Selam referred to seletane’s Others, or hezbu (the mass), as “backward” and “uncivilized” (yalseletene), even though they understood seletane would not move forward without the participation of the hezb. That the intellectual played a major part in enunciating new ways of thinking to a public that otherwise was presumed to be backward and detached was often obliquely implied in the paper. In particular, Tekle Hawaryat Tekle Mariam was keen to introduce modern theater in Ethiopia, even though he believed the hezb was not modern enough to understand the sophistication that theater provided. The writers of the period emphasized that theater and cinema were emblems of seletane that Ethiopia should immediately embrace. Tekle Hawaryat, who is widely considered the founder of modern Ethiopian theater, was educated in Russia (Moscow and Odessa), where he studied for eleven years. He produced the first modern stage production, Fabula comeda (The fable in comedy), upon his return from Russia. He wrote: “I wanted to take the examples of the fables of Aesop and La Fontaine and I wrote a story called Yawurewoch Teret (animal stories) in Amharic. I published this during the reign of Empress Zewditu and later changed it to theater.”48 He said he was forced to make Fabula comeda after watching Hiruy Wolde Selassie’s stage production of traditional music. A diplomat, a writer, and one of the most prolific intellectuals of the twentieth century, Hiruy had considered a traditional music repertoire as a modern play, much to Tekle Hawaryat’s dismay. On his return from England, where he had been sent as a diplomat and where he frequented the theater houses, Hiruy produced a show that he thought was similar to what he had seen in England, only to be scorned by Tekle Hawaryat for lacking sophistication and for presenting something that only the supposedly backward hezb could understand. One striking condition in this dynamic was that Tekle Hawaryat not only was the

producer of Fabula comeda but also served as audience and critic to Hiruy’s stage production. Validating his work to an audience of elites, the critic as artist gauged the aesthetic and intellectual dimensions that the new negotiation of seletane should provide. The most immediate conclusion to flow from the intellectuals’ sensibility is also a fixed notion of hezb, however varied the formations and histories within it. It is difficult to confine hezbu within one homogenous and static category, and I would argue that the intellectual elite-nonelite discord has also been relational and has not quite been ordered as binary. Also important to the invocation of the hezb by the intellectual elites is that it ignored the vast differences of power within the cultural, class, gender, and ethnic boundaries of hezbu and only seemed to refer to a certain notion of hezbu that was male, northern, and Semitic. In other words, the locus of discussion relative to hezb only applied to the historically represented hegemonic group of the northern and Semitic male constituency. When discussing events that pertained to theater and cinema, writers also routinely described the characteristics of the stage and the audience. They talked about the members of the nobility who attended these events, and they were proud of the sophistication of the rest of the audience, exclusively constituted by people like themselves who sat in one place for the duration of the performance. For instance, Berhanena Selam commented on a “pleasant chewata” (which means “play” in its literal form, not in the sense of a theater production), in a piece called “Theater weyem chewata” (Theater or chewata): On 21st Yekatit [February] Sunday, nine thirty there was on Monsieur Glez [not an Ethiopian name, perhaps Greek or Armenian] hotel, a pleasant chewata that was conducted by people who learned the craft. And a lot of distinguished people were gathered. Pleasant chewatas were presented and people were entertained. When the performers talked happily, their body language also changed to happiness. Similarly, when they talked about sadness, their body language change[d] to grief. In the middle of the chewata, one of the women brought a bouquet of flowers and spread it on the audience. Singing along [with] the piano, she mesmerized the hearts of the distinguished audience. The performers take this as their job

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and travel all over to entertain people. This kind of chewata is being performed every Wednesday and Sunday at Monsieur Glez’s hotel. The chewata entertains people until six p.m.49 One of the strongest themes in early twentieth-century writing was a favorable portrayal of the monarch and the nobility as ardent advocates of the novel cultural productions that materialized. Certainly, the new culture brought forth the “distinguished” people, largely comprising the monarch, the royal family, and the nobility as an elite group that was cohesive, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan and an exclusive audience that was excitedly responsive to the new cultural ideas. For instance, the renowned scholar and writer Merse-Hazen Wolde Qirqos, who also contributed to Berhanena Selam, extensively wrote in his memoir that such original inventions were indicators of progress that required new ways of thinking.50 Here, I would also refer to Merse-Hazen’s mention of Gebreegzabher Elias, who in the early 1900s worked as an illustrator for the Ministry of the Pen. With the ideological shift of the early twentieth century had come a radical change in the traditional/religious functions of art, and a visual language of commentary and criticism that was broadly removed from religious significations had begun to emerge. Merse-Hazen highlighted this enterprise. In 1906, the mehal safari (soldiers who did not have a specific stand but who opportunistically pledged allegiance to those who responded positively to the mehal safari’s various demands that could include anything from food to wage increases) wanted Fitawrari Habtegiorgis to relinquish his power as the minister of the armed forces. Habtegiorgis had refused to resign when Crown Prince Tefferi Mekonnen convened the nobility to deliberate on the mehal safari’s demand. The nobility ultimately decided against Habtegiorgis’s discharge, which disgruntled the mehal safari. According to Merse-Hazen, Gebreegzabher referenced this incident in a strong public criticism of the mehal safari and their problematic values. Gebreegzabher expressed his reproach in both a poem and an illustration, which he presented to Empress Zewditu. Merse-Hazen noted that the empress appreciated the satirical implications of the poem as well as the esoteric symbolism and caricature of Gebreegzabher’s illustration. By revealing that Zewditu welcomed the work of Gebreegzabher, Merse-Hazen suggested the will of the monarch, which in turn indirectly suggested the reasoning that

all people should embrace. Vaguely or not, Merse-Hazen, like most of the other intellectuals, attempted to discipline and condition the consciousness of the people, who should now look forward to the new and emancipatory cultural values of seletane that even the monarch acclaimed. I also mention Merse-Hazen’s reference to Gebreegzabher’s illustration to point out the advent of a concrete idea of critique in political formations. Such a conception of critique—which brought significant challenges to the conceptual and ethical status quo, in this case, the persistently unsettling demands of the mehal safari—was curious at a time when print culture was just beginning to materialize. The writers of Berhanena Selam were among the first to extensively foreground tropes of the modern and modernity through seletane. It can be argued the intellectuals clearly understood that the relationship between Ethiopia and Europe was about power and that on such an uneven playing field, a political consciousness that acknowledged the intimate relationship between sovereignty and economic self-sufficiency was necessary. A dynamic exchange materialized even through the realities of colonial domination that pervaded border countries. The range of writings revealed a particularly strong defiance against domination, even as they espoused the primacy of European ideas and concepts. Ironically, even as intellectuals insisted on sovereignty, this same sovereignty was thought to be maintainable only if Ethiopia appropriated the so-called civilizing institutions and infrastructure of Europe—though intellectuals also understood Europe threatened the safety of their sovereignty. It is interesting to trace the differences in judgment between the Berhanena Selam writers and later intellectual thinkers. Specifically, I refer to the distinction between the way in which the newspaper’s contributors acknowledged the empirical reality of their economy when compared to Europe yet desired and projected a new reality similar to Europe and the way in which later intellectuals debated and understood degeneracy and inequality in relation to the West. In other words, it is a question of how seletane was appropriated, translated, and rationalized in succeeding cultural and political thought, which I discuss in the following chapters of this book. Central to this motif is the understanding of a variety of widely different frameworks of the modern and modernity in intellectual thought. It is exceptionally significant to know about this because intellectual thought has predominantly deferred and shelved the political

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constructions of Ethiopian modernity within the paradox shared by all non-Western modernities. And notions such as zemenawinet (modernity), seletane (civilization), and zemenawi (which can mean both “modernization” and “modernity”) have either been interchanged or been given divergent meanings in later intellectual thought. Often, discussions of modernity continue to be broadly informed by the socioeconomic phenomena of modernization in the context of development, frequently complicit in projects of nation and empire, As happened with intellectual thought, Ethiopian artists’ engagement with modernism also emerged without an understanding of the larger political history of modernity. And intellectual thought and artistic practice continue to obscure the origins and historical claims of seletane. Art after the Italian Occupation (1941–57): The Modernists of the 1940s and 1950s with Particular Emphasis on Blaten Geta Emaelaf Hiruy, the Patriot Artist

The movement of the 1960s that culminated in the mass uprising of 1974 and extinguished the imperial institution and ideology began to brew as early as 1936 when the Italians invaded Ethiopia, a historical interlude that complicated notions of monarchy and nation. This small African nation, with its divinity tied to its kings and queens, defeated the Italians at Adwa but was overpowered by them in 1936. Emperor Haile Selassie left for French Somaliland on May 2, 1936, and later went into exile in Britain. A new set of intellectuals were particularly befuddled by Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia and the emperor’s flight. Moreover, the massive poverty that the intellectuals of Berhanena Selam had hoped would be eradicated once European infrastructure was appropriated actually endured and was exacerbated. Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia, the emperor’s decision to go into exile, and the country’s impoverishment forced a reexamination of the empire that had long been the dominant political form, wherein identity and imperial ideology had been deemed complementary. What requires our attention, then, is Ethiopia’s subsequent intellectual history, which also shaped artistic subjectivity beginning in 1941, immediately after the Italian occupation ended. This period lasted until the revolution of 1974.

On June 30, 1936, Haile Selassie gave a powerful speech at the League of Nations in Geneva, condemning Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. However, it was not until World War II, when Fascist Italy entered the fight in 1940 on the side of Germany and against Britain and France, that Britain waged war against the Italian-occupied countries in East Africa. The British army, along with Ethiopian warriors, ousted Italian troops from Ethiopia in 1941. By that point, the emperor had already left Britain for Khartoum to work with the British in their headquarters there, and he reassumed the throne after Italy’s withdrawal from Ethiopia in 1941. Artists and intellectuals of the 1940s had a conflicting and ambiguous relationship with monarchy and nation. Among the intellectuals, individuals such as Takkala Wolde Hawaryat resented the emperor’s decision to go into exile. Bahru Zewde wrote: “Once [Takkala Wolde Hawaryat] took that option, [the emperor] wrote him off from the future political life of the country. He even fleetingly considered republican government.”51 A graduate of the Raguel School, Takkala was the emperor’s Minister of Finance before the Italian occupation. Raguel Church in Addis Ababa is known to have generated erudite and savvy religious intellectuals who underwent rigorous training in the liturgy of the Orthodox Church. It could also be argued that although intellectuals and artists began to question a divine imperial ideology, the exceptionalist sensibility that was so thoroughly intertwined with the country’s rich history and long-standing sovereignty still prevailed in artistic practice and intellectual thought. But unlike artists and intellectuals of the preceding period, such as Belachew Yimer and the majority of the Berhanena Selam writers, who enthusiastically glorified monarchy and nation, this group of artists and intellectuals provoked arguments against the enduring national myth of imperial ideology, even if they were not entirely opposed to it. For their part, artists—even with the many paintings that were demanded of them by the state, such as church murals that glorified the nation and its divine monarch—somehow managed to develop a subversive and innovative edge, separate from the didactic and propagandist works that the state required. For example, Agegenhu Engida, who produced several of the statecommissioned murals, is said to have derided the monarch through his painting Three Donkeys. The current whereabouts of the painting are not known, and some say that the artist’s mysterious death in a car accident in 1950 was related to his acrimony toward the emperor.52 Agegenhu, who

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was an early modernist considered to have heralded Ethiopian modern art, was sent abroad to study art. He studied in Paris at a time when key developments of early twentieth-century modern art were taking place. The Parisian avant-garde was still fresh in the 1920s and 1930s when Agegenhu attended school. Unlike Skunder Boghossian’s Paris experiences in the 1950s and 1960s, which have been widely covered, very little is known about Agegenhu’s time in the city. Despite his stay during a historic moment, his work was influenced more by the styles of old eighteenth-century European masters rather than the avant-garde. One might imagine that he would go back to his homeland with a radical and transformational artistic style, but Agegenhu actually returned to Ethiopia with an altogether different orientation. Although he broke away from earlier traditions of the Belachew Yimer type, his stylistic language veered toward portraits and landscape scenes as he simultaneously painted biblical and mythological themes that were commissioned by the state. Agegenhu is well known for his captivating 1944 self-portrait (Figure 1.3), one of the first portraits in Ethiopian modernism’s history to have included strong European formal elements. Although portrait paintings were also made by Belachew in the middle of the 1920s, Agegenhu’s portrait has a quasi-photographic quality, with minimal distortion to the face. Belachew’s portraits consisted of simple brushstrokes, whereas Agegenhu’s self-portrait is highly naturalistic; the face is rendered in minute, realistic detail with clear brushstrokes and a loose style. With the conventional depiction of three-quarters of the face, the artist looks posed as he gazes directly at the viewer. He is bespectacled, and in his relaxed elegance, he represents the quintessential modern man. His tie is painted with green, yellow, and red, the colors of the Ethiopian flag, although the predominant color scheme is accentuated in darker and more subtle tones. The dark colors in the background emphasize his gaze. The eyes of the artist are captivating, and the gaze evokes elements of character and identity. Agegenhu returned to Ethiopia to witness massive poverty and injustice. Acutely disheartened, he expressed these problems through several of his paintings. According to art critic Seyum Wolde, Agegenhu had also expressed this discontent to Emperor Haile Selassie and to politicians of the imperial state.53 Although we have no firm evidence to substantiate Seyum’s claim, we do know that Agegenhu was called to the emperor’s palace late one evening and after leaving his house was repeatedly run

Figure 1.3 Agegenhu Engida. Self Portrait. 1944. 50.5 × 38 cm. Oil on plywood.

Courtesy of the National Museum of Ethiopia.

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over by an unknown car. His wounded body was left on the street to be picked up by neighborhood security forces. Agegenhu died immediately afterward.

 In the years immediately following the Italo-Ethiopian War, Haile Selassie was occupied with reworking, replaying, and restaging his power in productive ways. An exuberant rhetoric of modernization had begun to emerge, and this served as a useful strategy to reestablish his image. He put in place civil service mechanisms and placed heavy emphasis on building educational institutions; in fact, modern education in particular became the vehicle of official nationalism. The early rhetoric of education in the years immediately after the Italian occupation emphasized the efficacy and practicality of education in terms of modernizizing the country. The opening of schools was advantageous and critical to image building, and the first thing the emperor did after returning from exile was to open two prominent secondary schools—General Wingate and Tefferi Mekonnen—in which key positions were occupied by European personnel. The later rhetoric, which developed after the solidification of power, defined the emperor as chosen by God and encouraged the governed to act in accordance with this transcendent principle. Several variants of nationalist pedagogy also developed in discursive frames that legitimated the emperor’s power. The state’s legitimacy rested on the defining features of the nation, which presented itself as the historical extension of divine kings and queens and thereby made the emperor the country’s rightful protector. The expansion of print media after the war facilitated the official nationalist narrative. Newspapers as well as school textbooks and notebooks presented the emperor’s portraits and described his “grace” and “magnanimity” and at times declared his “divinity.” While artists illustrated textbooks and notebooks and created paintings that acclaimed the emperor, writers wrote about his benevolence; all were obliged to produce works within this national consciousness that acknowledged and upheld the emperor’s hegemonic sovereignty. “What is interesting,” remarked Partha Chatterjee in 2003, “is the special way in which a particular national culture turns an image into an icon, to be reproduced, distributed, displayed, and sacralized.”54 In elucidating the historical construction of the divine nature of early Indian rulers, Chatterjee (1994) stated, “Where kings acquire

kingdoms and hold power by divine grace, the business of arriving at a verdict on the character of rulers has to be negotiated between kings and gods. The only role that the ordinary subject has in all this is in bearing the consequences of the actions of these superior entities.”55 What Chatterjee humorously said about present-day India could equally apply to Ethiopians in that era: “Ancient glory, present misery: the subject of this entire story is us. The mighty heroes of ancient India were our ancestors and the feeble inhabitants of India today are ‘ourselves.’”56 For Ethiopians, modernity became a “nativism” that consisted of loyalty to the emperor, the flag, and the empire. Haile Selassie’s translation of Ethiopian modernity was therefore radical nativism that had gone incongruously imperial. Still, it is important to assess the imaginaries and sensibilities of modernity in Haile Selassie’s time, not only because his modernist projects are still widely discussed among Ethiopian intellectuals but also because his reign significantly charted the course of Ethiopian modernism. The modernism of the 1960s that I discuss in chapter 2 particularly represents the height of Ethiopian modernism, in which a new genre of literature, art, and music flourished. But even in the 1940s and 1950s, when the regime’s modernization rhetoric was beginning to surface, artists’ works foregrounded multiple imaginaries about what it meant to be modern. Artists such as Agegenhu Engida and Abebe Wolde Giorgis were sent abroad for art education during Haile Selassie’s regency as crown prince, and many more were sent during the 1940s and 1950s: Alle Felege Selam, Afework Tekle, Tadesse Gizaw, Zerihun Domenico, Yigezu Bisrat, Skunder Boghossian, Gebre Kristos Desta, and others. All would return in the 1950s and 1960s to express what Andreas Eshete has explained as “the sensibility of modernism that vividly exemplified essential virtues of modernity: individuality, freedom, bold exploration of novel possibilities.”57 They brought forth an artistic subjectivity that in its nature and its bearing opened a variety of investigations. Those who were sent to study abroad in the 1930s, such as Abebe Wolde Giorgis who pursued his studies in sculpture in Marseille and lived in Paris for eighteen years, returned and became leaders in their field. Abebe, for example, was the head of the Fine Arts Section of the newly established Ministry of Education and Fine Arts, and Agegenhu Engida became the assistant director. In 1942, Agegenhu also opened an art school with his own meager income in his studio at the Parliament building, teaching the

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styles and techniques of European painting. In 1946, Abebe also opened an art school, called Kine Tibebe, on the campus of Menelik II School. And those who never went abroad, among them Yemane Berhan Tembele (1895–1970) and Belachew Bekuretsion (1919–1990), worked on portraits and vivid landscapes; meanwhile, Aleka Wolde Medhin Yitagesu (1894– 1982) and Araya Dawit (1893–1972) worked on paintings that depicted traditional church schools. Perhaps the most interesting artist from this period was Blaten Geta Emaelaf Hiruy, who created powerful, realistic paintings that were radical for their time. Blaten Geta was a title given to Hiruy by Emperor Haile Selassie; it means “lord of the pages.” Emaelaf was a selftaught artist who never went abroad for art education. The lack of adequate material about mid-twentieth-century artists such as Emaelaf and Agegenhu makes it challenging to research their work thoroughly. The artworks that are available are few in number, since most are in private collections, outside the country, or lost. To cite one example, the study of Agegenhu Engida’s works is circumscribed to two available paintings: the self-portrait that I discussed earlier in this chapter and a portrait of a woman called W/O Aster Mengesha. Both belong to the collection of the National Museum of Ethiopia. However, there are several of Agegenhu’s state-commissioned works, such as the mural at Debre Berhan Selassie Church and the portrait of Empress Mennen (Emperor Haile Selassie’s wife), at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies. The works of Abebe Wolde Giorgis, who is said to have exhibited in Marseille and Paris and won medals at both national and international levels, cannot be found. But works of painters such as Belachew and his contemporaries are less challenging to locate because Europeans were fascinated with these paintings and extensively documented their provenances. And due to this great interest from European travelers and scholars, works have also made their way to ethnographic museums in Europe. In the generation that followed, artists such as Emaelaf, Agegenhu, and Abebe followed classic European styles that did not satisfy the curiosity of European travelers-scholars. Comparing and contrasting the few works that I have found in the context of their own period and genre is also problematic, since artists were simultaneously engaged in creating state-commissioned works that glorified the monarch in various capacities as well as their own experimental works. Moreover, dates are missing from the few noncommissioned works

that are available for research. Whether the state-commissioned works and the artists’ own creative pieces were produced in tandem or in separate episodes is not known. Besides depicting royal images in the murals of the churches, artists were also commissioned to do portraits of the emperor and the royal family, and today, there are many portraits of this genre at the National Museum of Ethiopia. It is therefore necessary to interrogate the historical context of the period to give enhanced meaning to artistic subjectivity and practice. As can be seen from the few noncommissioned works that are available, artists most emphatically had a sophisticated modernist orientation. Indeed, they produced works commissioned by the state that are entirely distinct from their own creative works, but even these state-commissioned pieces had individual flair and modern inclinations. In the case of Emaelaf Hiruy, state-commissioned works, such as the mural in Arada Giorgis, are considerably different from the three modernist works that I was able to find. The mural was initially painted by his father, the renowned painter Aleka Hiruy, but was destroyed by Fascist bombs on February 19, 1937, on a day popularly known by its date in the Gregorian calendar, Yekatit 12. This day saw the genocide and massacre of thousands of Ethiopians by Italian Fascist troops. After the occupation in 1941, Emaelaf was summoned by Emperor Haile Selassie to restore Aleka Hiruy’s painting at Arada Giorgis. The facade of the church had remained erect, untouched by the bombing, although treasures inside were totally annihilated. The building was quickly rehabilitated, and Emaelaf began the mural work in 1942. At the time, he had also opened his own private studio and had completed several commissioned works, including a logo for the newly established Ethiopian Airlines (1945). Arada Giorgis was collaboratively completed with Afework Tekle, and according to Seyum Wolde, Emaelaf finalized this job with great hesitation. Emaelaf had said, “What can I do? I take orders. I can’t give orders.”58 Passionate for realistic types of works such as portraits and landscapes, he wanted to distance himself from the Orthodox Christian repertoire, although he thought the painting at Arada Giorgis was his best work, particularly the depiction of Saint George and the Dragon there. He exclaimed: “The horse!!! You can see the dust that blows from the horse’s feet.”59 In an extremely different style, he also created Shemaglew (The old man) and two landscape paintings that hang at the National Museum of

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Ethiopia today. His Shemaglew is one of the most refined works in early modernism’s history. Its pictorial genre is completely different from its predecessors’. The work is not dated, although art critic Seyum Wolde said that it was made in the latter part of the 1940s.60 In a 1981 synopsis of the artist’s life, Seyum wrote that Shemaglew “profoundly depicts Emaelaf’s philosophy of life as well as his painterly sophistication.”61 According to Seyum, Emaelaf was an active painter before and after the Italian occupation. Emaelaf Hiruy: The Patriot Artist

Younger than the intellectuals of Berhanena Selam, Emaelaf Hiruy came of age during an exuberant time when the issues surrounding modernization were given much attention. When the debates about seletane began with the newpaper’s intellectuals, Emaelaf was in his twenties. It was after the Italian occupation that he, along with a new generation of artists, engaged in work that was distinctly different from that in prior periods. Born in 1908 in Fiche, Emaelaf was a self-taught artist. As noted earlier, his father, Aleka Hiruy, was a renowned painter of church art, best known for his murals at the churches of Arada Giorgis and Entoto Mariam. Emaelaf’s nephew is Alle Felege Selam, one of the pioneers of modern Ethiopian art who also founded the Fine Art School in 1957. Emaelaf learned the skill of painting from his father at an early age. He was eighteen when he assisted his father at Entoto Mariam Church and just nineteen when he presented a portrait of a member of the royal family to Crown Prince Tefferi Mekonnen. It is said that the crown prince commented on Emaelaf’s genius and told the artist’s father, “I am sure you are envious of your son who has surpassed your skill”; Aleka Hiruy responded, “It is God’s will.”62 Seyum Wolde wrote that this situation created tension between father and son, particularly since Emaelaf chose to follow modern styles of painting rather than the religious type that his father had hoped he would undertake. When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1936, Emaelaf Hiruy, along with many others, joined the underground armed movement against the Fascist occupation. I should also note that my account of Emaelaf is largely based—except for the formalist analysis of his works—on Seyum Wolde’s writings about the artist. The “patriot artist,” as he is popularly known, lost his brother in the war against Italian fascism, and he was especially

remembered by comrades in the movement for his technical skills. He was quick to repair and maintain military equipment as well as recycle bullets, which helped in alleviating the tremendous shortage of ammunition. The advent of photography in the early 1900s had inspired artists to make portraits. Belachew Yimer painted portraits of prominent figures such as the emperor of Japan and, later, Emperor Haile Selassie I. And in some interviews, Emaelaf also said that he had done many portraits, although the only one found today is that of Empress Mennen, hanging at the National Museum of Ethiopia. First introduced to the court of Menelik II by Alfred Ilg, photography took a significant turn when an Armenian by the name of Bedros Boyadjian settled in Ethiopia in 1905. Boyadjian became the first royal photographer and chronicled Emperor Menelik II’s life. After Boyadjian died, his son Tony became the court photographer for Emperor Haile Selassie. The Boyadjians are among the members of the Armenian diaspora who escaped the persecution of the Ottoman Empire. Armenians settled in large numbers in Ethiopia in the early part of the twentieth century and are known to have brought new technical know-how, significantly the technical and artistic skills of photography. The Boyadjians influenced a generation of artists who were engaged in portraiture work, including Emaelaf Hiruy. A Close Reading of Emaelaf Hiruy’s Shemaglew

For an artist who never received any Western training, Emaelaf incorporated elements of European artistic renderings in his exceptional portrayal entitled Shemaglew (Figure 1.4). According to the various interviews he granted, he gave primacy to the human body. He repeatedly said that he liked to paint faces and depict the vicissitudes of the human body, and Shemaglew is a quintessential example. It shows an old man who is half naked and has half of his body draped with a tattered white shama (Ethiopian shawl); he is bent and wary and holding a cane. He seems burdened with age, loneliness, and misfortune. He is struggling against the force of an unrelenting wind, which is pushing him to the left as he strains to maintain his arched and despondent posture to the right. In the background is a mountain, a lush green tree, and a dark blue sky. Ironically, the color of the sky, although radiant, harmoniously blends with the darkness of the theme. It is as if the entire world had conspired against this despairing old man.

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Figure 1.4 Emaelaf Hiruy. Shemaglew. Date unknown. 34 × 44 cm. Oil on ply-

wood. Courtesy of the National Museum of Ethiopia.

The lines of his legs up to his torso are in perfect symmetry with the rest of his body, which is arched. His white beard merges with the white shama that falls across his brown body. In this balanced composition, the viewer witnesses a certain battle for survival, a life that had been harsh but nonetheless desired. Certainly, this man has been rejected by life, and his face, which is the focal point, is tilted slightly upward, as if he is trying to see further toward the horizon. The old man’s eyes are searching for something different, something other than what he currently has. The angled face is hoping for an unknown, and this face is refined despite the hardship that it expresses. Through his face, we sense the man is sure that whatever uncertainties lie ahead will not be any worse than his current reality. Life has, in a sense, forbidden this man to live, yet he has chosen to persevere, hoping to one day embrace life’s promises.

Emaelaf once said, “You can tell the difference between a vicious face and a genteel one, not from what the person says but from the marks and features of the face.”63 Indeed, the face of the Shemaglew, in which all that is human can be measured, is intimate to the viewer who also owns its vulnerability. In what seems a conflicting position, Emaelaf was engaged in glorifying the monarch in state-commissioned works while he simultaneously portrayed the harsh realities of lived experiences in works such as this one. With utmost subtlety, Shemaglew interrogated impoverishment and its indignity. Painted in oil on canvas, it was one of the early masterpieces of modernism. European modernism had challenged the conservatism of realism, but in contrast, Emaelaf used realism to narrate the human condition in mid-twentieth-century Ethiopia. Complicating earlier imaginations of the nation, Emaelaf painted an Ethiopia that was old and worn out. As if mocking all the state-commissioned works that he had done that glorified Ethiopia and its divine monarch, he depicted the indignities of poverty that had intimately besieged the nation, and he painted the nation begging for mercy. Today, decades later, Shemaglew still hauntingly represents the contemporary realities of Ethiopia. In its time, Shemaglew represented Emaelaf as an artist and, by extension, members of his generation as well—their ambivalence, their tortured relationship with the monarchy and what it meant to be a citizen, and their notion of art and its place in society. Clearly, artistic production had significantly shifted in the 1940s and 1950s. In often technically flawless forms and styles, artists such as Emaelaf produced works that understood the contemporary moment and attempted to abandon the commemorative gestures of monarchy and nation. The irony was that these artists were also obliged to produce state-commissioned works that sanctified the very ideas behind nation and nationalism that they tested and provoked in their own experimental works. The establishment of the Fine Art School in 1957 particularly shaped the open-ended inquiries and stimulating debates surrounding monarchy and nation. The school introduced the new and multilayered meaning of 1960s modernism. But a most fundamental issue is whether the origin of a Eurocentric curriculum of art education contributed to the continuing quandary of aesthetic practice that does not engage the politics and histories of non-Western modernism and that largely mimics European aesthetic practices of the Renaissance category. Though the production

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of art significantly changed from the repertoire of church paintings, art production did not consider the particularities of Ethiopian modernism. Ethiopian exceptionalism persisted in artistic thought and practice, even as artists openly and critically narrated the injustices of imperial ideology. The Formation of the Fine Art School

Most of the intellectuals who preceded the Berhanena Selam writers were educated at Haile Selassie I University. When it opened in 1950, key positions were staffed by European personnel. Initially operated by American Jesuits and later by Mormons at both the faculty and administrative levels, the University College of Addis Ababa, later renamed Haile Selassie I University, was originally modeled after US universities. Consequently, one cannot talk about the inception of higher education in Ethiopia without critically engaging its Western genealogy. The overall foundation of modern education and its continuing challenge has recently been debated by scholars such as Bahru Zewde and Messay Kebede, who have widely divergent views on the incorporation, adaption, and integration of Western traditions and values in forming the educational system of Haile Selassie I University.64 Scholars such as Messay believe the colonial order that emerged from Western educational and academic traditions in that university led to marginalization and exclusion. In fact, the responsibility for effecting modern education was given to expatriate staff, who, according to Messay, had “chased the representatives of the traditional culture out of modern institutions.”65 He also has written about modern education’s “colonial encounter” that marginalized traditional knowledge and “accomplished what military means had failed to achieve.”66 Indeed, as early as 1965, a few scholars, including Egwale Gebreyohannes, had also expressed concern about the absence of traditional knowledge in the curricula of modern education. In Yekeftegna temehert zeybe (The methods of higher education) (1965), Egwale stated: “In our age, there are two kinds of civilizations. We will reach the correct methodology of education only if we are able to thoroughly understand both civilizations for their wealth and particularity. We cannot substitute one by another or combine these two civilizations together.”67 The two civilizations Egwale referenced were the European and Ethiopian civilizations, both of which, he believed, had a rich history.

Although the Fine Art School, which was founded in 1957, was not incorporated in Addis Ababa University until 1995, its curriculum, like that of the university, glorified the structures of European modernism and gave little importance to traditional aesthetic practices or to other non-Western art. In this regard, it should be noted that even though the debates on modernization that appeared in Berhanena Selam revolved around the technological infrastructures of Europe, the spaces of knowledge production that early intellectuals sought from Europe did not annihilate the roots of traditional knowledge. One of the most ominous narratives of modernization in later intellectual thought involved its disregard for traditional knowledge and, beyond that, its remarkable apathy about engaging the histories and theories of colonialism and their impact on the spaces of knowledge production in the peripheries. For instance, in Pioneers of Change: Reformist Intellectuals of the Early 20th Century, Bahru Zewde acclaimed the early intellectuals of Berhanena Selam such as Blaten Geta Hiruy Wolde Selassie, who were formed in the riches of the scholastic enterprise of the Orthodox Church. But Bahru’s later critique launched against Messay Kebede’s contention is nevertheless troublesome. In his trail-blazing work on the history of the Ethiopian Student Movement, entitled Quest for Socialist Utopia (2014), Bahru argued that Messay’s claim to traditional knowledge was an exclusive regard for the knowledge of the Orthodox Church and that Messay’s argument was not representative of knowledge from non-Christian beliefs. Bahru wrote: “As it stands apart from its non-scientific character, the traditional church based educational system excludes a significant proportion of the Ethiopian population that does not adhere to the Orthodox Christian faith.”68 Certainly, the hegemonic values and philosophies of the Orthodox Church that Bahru raised are not debatable—indeed, they are a central theme that I interrogate in the following chapters of this book. However, his allusion to the knowledge of the Orthodox Church as “non-scientific” and therefore not adaptable to the “scientific” and, by analogy, to the “civilizing” modern world problematically ignored the historical phenomena of colonial modernity and spaces of knowledge production. The real issue is how knowledge is intertwined, interwoven, and implicated with the political setting of what Valentin Mudimbe has called “the projected modernity of colonialism.”69 Yet this major theme is rarely examined by contemporary scholars. The sheer omission of a non-Western perspective in the genesis

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and evolution of modern education has contributed to such a quandary. And it is this same paradox that also constructed the ideas and imaginations behind the intellectual and aesthetic formation, as well as the progression, of the Fine Art School. The Fine Art School was established within the emperor’s paternalistic regimen of modernity, in which art and literature were considered to have an important repertoire of content. Though the emperor upheld the national culture of traditional Ethiopian art and sought to preserve it in the face of foreign influences, he also entrusted the fantasies of progress and innovation to modern art. In his speech at the inauguration of the school on August 17, 1957, he remarked: “We supported the establishment of this school because we think that modern artists will combine traditional methods and send their creative works to the modern platforms of the West, letting the world know that Ethiopians are also part of the modern world.”70 The school’s main progenitor and mastermind was Alle Felege Selam. Haile Selassie’s symbolic support for the school showed the emperor to be a true patron of the arts and culture, but it was Alle Felege Selam’s efforts, more than any state-sponsored program, that eventually gave rise to the opening of the school. With a donation of 100,000 Ethiopian birr from the Ministry of Education and an additional 50,000 birr gained through Alle Felege Selam’s own fund-raising efforts, the school was built at the back of Menelik II School and was inaugurated by the emperor on his own birthday, August 17. Initially operated under the Ministry of Education, the Fine Art School opened up with sixty students, a shortage of teachers, and a pattern of education that did not yield much for critical discourse. In addition to Alle Felege Selam, who launched the art school with much hard work, enthusiasm, and optimism, the school was initially staffed with European personnel: of the four teachers in the school, three were European. Some of these Europeans were trained artists, such as the Italian Victor Fumo, who taught painting, while others, although trained in their distinct fields, were just there by chance. For instance, the Austrian Herbert Seiler, who studied sculpture in Austria and traveled to Ethiopia on a motorcycle adventure that first took him to Egypt, taught sculpture in the school. In the traditional mediums of sculpture and painting, artists were taught to produce technically flawless, European modernist aesthetics. In the school’s early period, church painters used the studio spaces, although

church painting itself was not part of the new and modern curriculum. Students were not interested in learning the styles, techniques, and forms, let alone the theological knowledge, behind church paintings, nor were they encouraged in that direction. Nonetheless, almost all of their works were inspired by the traditions of their past, which certainly included church paintings. The paradox was that whereas their predecessors understood the meanings of traditional values such as the knowledge embedded in the traditions of the Orthodox Church, this new generation of artists disregarded this knowledge and failed to address the scope and merits of their past in its complexity. Yet even though they fully embraced the ideologies of European modernism, they also took pride in the things that set the nation apart, such as the country’s rich history spanning many centuries, the astounding archive of Ethiopia’s Christian artifacts, and the legacy of the country’s written and oral poetry. At the heart of their practice was Ethiopia’s splendid past—but without the scope and complexity that comprised the body of knowledge of the past and without reference to the complications that caused the injustices of their present. Such was the enigma that shaped the founding of the Fine Art School. It is particularly interesting to interrogate the artists’ imagination of the nation because an exceptionalist imaginary that excludes Ethiopia from colonial critique continues to filter into contemporary artistic practice. Surely, the founding of the school marked the beginning of a stimulating time in Ethiopian modernism’s history. The school also sent young students abroad soon after its opening, all of whom would eventually become teachers at the school. And it was not until the return of these artists, in particular the return of Skunder Boghossian and Gebre Kristos Desta, that the school began to formulate ways in which artists could articulate their sense of self in a wider social and political context. But artistic production and pedagogy were unfortunately centered on the languages of European modernism, and this legacy continues to haunt the school’s present-day curriculum. Artists such as Skunder Boghossian played a crucial role in introducing the multiple imperatives of modernism, but many of the early progenies and teachers of the Fine Art School uncritically assumed the universal languages of European modernism in impeccably European modernist forms and styles. What is crucial, however, is that both brands of artists complicated notions of nation, monarchy, and imperial ideology. By producing a

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large body of works that reflected the troubles of their society, artists subversively engaged the state’s imperial ideology. Ironically, the emperor valorized their works even as they deconstructed imperial ideology, since he had built an image as an outspoken decolonizing leader in the 1960s and a part of the vanguard of African resistance to colonial rule. For instance, Afework Tekle, Gebre Kristos Desta, and Skunder Boghossian all received the outstanding achievement prizes for modern art from the prestigious Haile Selassie I Foundation. Even in trajectories of contention, a different discursive form of power that was not only negative but also productive had emerged. Here, it is also important to note the emperor’s momentous role in the emblematic stained-glass work of Afework Tekle at the entrance of Africa Hall. An artist who was educated at the Slade School of Arts in London, Afework is known for his hyperrealistic work. In 1958, he had just returned from the Slade School when he designed a prominent stained-glass window, entitled The Struggle and Aspiration of the African People, that symbolized Africa’s anticolonial struggle and the continent’s independent future. Afework never joined the Fine Art School, but his art left an indelible mark on Ethiopian modernism. The creative arts movement in the Fine Art School that had just begun in the 1960s was literally extinguished after the 1974 uprising. Seventeen years of socialist leadership took a toll on the production of the creative arts. How the school’s initial curriculum modeled on the European archetype evolved and how the school performed under different regimes are elaborated in chapters 3, 4, and 5. The Fine Art School was merged with Addis Ababa University in 1995, changing its name to the School of Fine Art and Design, and in 2011, it was renamed after its first director, Alle Felege Selam. Today, it is known as the Alle School of Fine Art and Design.

 By way of conclusion, I would stress that I have been concerned in this chapter with the ideological themes that generated questions on the political, conceptual, and social processes of modernity during the years 1900 to 1957. The historical and cultural conditions made the period’s modernism necessary, imparting a substantial and significant texture to the movement’s origins and stylistic evolution. In this regard, I have argued that

Ethiopian modern art can only be understood within the wider world of intellectual thought, precisely because the contexts that shaped the categories of intellectual thought also found expression in visual art. The link between intellectual thought and modern artistic practice became particularly important in the 1960s, the prime of Ethiopian modernism, when the intimate rapport between artists, writers, and student activists was visibly manifest. Though it was primarily a literary and political movement, it had a vast bearing on the artistic consciousness that ultimately informed the modernism of subsequent periods. In chapter 2, I examine the ideology of social and political thought to understand intellectural movements and their relationship to the artistic practice of the 1960s.

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Chapter 2

Intellectual Thought of the 1960s The Prime of Ethiopian Modernism

context of change and innovation among artists and intellectuals emerged in the 1950s and the 1960s. The Fine Art School paired with the political, cultural, and intellectual landscape to shape the complex constitution of the time. But how can the period’s moral and political principles, on the one hand, and the cultural production, on the other, be better understood and theorized, particularly in the absence of written sources that pertain to the era’s cultural history? I argue that the only way to frame a narrative of the period’s art history, as well as the profound shift in political and cultural sensibilities, is to investigate the range of writings that also informed artistic subjectivity. Practically all visual artists of the 1960s were closely acquainted with the writers of the day, and without a doubt, the intimate rapport between the visual and literary intellectuals played a vital role in shaping the modernism of the 1960s; furthermore, their rapport profoundly altered and manipulated modernism’s subsequent formulation. And a central way to craft a narrative of the period’s exhilarating art history is to investigate the writings and other intellectual expressions, including the radical political thought of the era, that also informed artistic

A charged

subjectivity. I believe this approach will open a larger perspective in which to understand the period’s visual modernism. The substantive import of the modernism of the 1960s stemmed as well from the spirit of dissent that arose from writers, activists, artists, and other intellectuals. How this form of dissension was reimagined, translated, and reproduced in cultural lives can only be understood if we examine the relationship between intellectual thought and artistic practice. Ethiopian artists and writers of the 1960s also worked at a time when imperialism and colonialism were under heavy fire by young African intellectuals who were deeply disturbed by the civilizing mission that was typically assumed by Westerners. The independence and liberation movements that engulfed the continent for a new African identity nonetheless provoked different experiences of independence for Ethiopia’s young, emerging artists, writers, and student activists who were unfamiliar with the colonial structure because of their colonial history. Therefore, it is equally important to grasp the intellectuals’ broader social and cultural panAfricanist commitment—their approaches and forms of resistance, negotiation, and transformation within the wider struggle against colonialism and racial injustice. Did Ethiopian activists who reached political maturity in the 1960s articulate their opposition in terms of a colonial rule that they sought to break? And were the pan-African imagery and sensibility evoked by Ethiopian writers, artists, and student activists? Addressing these queries is necessary to position the ideas and philosophies behind Ethiopian visual modernism and its materialization, since the effects of the 1960s continue to shape practices in contemporary art. Though there were many writers in this era, I focus on a limited set of articles from the Addis Reporter, the period’s most important art and culture magazine, and exhaustively attend to three seminal novels and poems that expressed the dilemmas and perplexities of the modern intellectual: Dagnachew Worku’s Adefres, Bealu Grima’s KeAdmas Bashager, and Yohannes Admassu’s Este teteyeku. Modernism: Writings and Movements

Whose minds were agitated Those artists of Sheger Hopelessly impatient

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Tesfaye Gessese from Harar and from Axum it was Sebhat Dagnachew Worku from Yifat And Mengistu from Aleka Lemma’s city, Ankober, if I remember right Gebre Kristos Desta from Haromaya And Kermemo from Gulele Next to General Wingate, the school where we grew up Yohannes Admassu looking at her from afar From the city of Harar And Skunder Queried But who are you? Burning until he peeled Following the paint, the smear and the shade Running until he coughed Tired Solomon Deressa, excerpt from “Bati” (Translation mine)1 Poet, art critic, and essayist Solomon Deressa returned to Ethiopia from Paris in the early 1960s and wrote extensively on the period’s provoking and exhilarating arts and culture movements. In “Bati,” he recalled a great past and exquisitely described the feats of actor Tesfaye Gessese, novelists Dagnachew Worku and Sebhat Gebreegzabher, poets Mengistu Lemma and Yohannes Admassu, and visual artists Gebre Kristos Desta and Skunder Boghossian, evoking their relations, peculiarities, desires and passion. In compelling and vivid imagery, Solomon told us that these writers and artists mutually wove the values of literature into chromatic experiences and vice versa and that they brought with them a new imagination that subverted and jettisoned all boundaries between visual imagery and the written language. Indeed, artists and writers converged at the Kine Tebebat Wetheatre on the Sidist Kilo campus of Haile Selassie I University—later known as the Creative Arts Center—for poetry recitals and exhibitions, at the Haile Selassie I and Hager Fikir Theaters for performances, and at the Fine Art School for art exhibitions. Playwright Abate Mekuria also recalled their monthly gatherings, noting that they were often filled with stimulating

discussions on topics ranging from politics to trends in art and literature, as well as simple and absurd conversations on occasion.2 Abate, who was a senior producer and director of Ethiopian Television in the 1960s, featured artists, writers, musicians, and actors in his weekly program, Presenting Men and Women. The world of theater added enormous value to the contemporary artistic scene. Mengistu Lemma’s Telfo bekise (Marriage by abduction) and Tsegaye Gebremedhin’s adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays mesmerized the artists and intellectuals of the 1960s. Tesfaye Gessese, one of the most prominent actors of the period, credited the development of the fascinating stage repertoires of the 1960s to the establishment of the Haile Selassie I Theater in 1953, and he gave glowing accolades to Tsegaye Gebremedhin, who did little-known creative plays in addition to the adaptations for which he is renowned. Among Tsegaye’s creative plays that Tesfaye admired were Yeshoh aklil (A thorn throne), Belg (Harvest), Joro degef (An ear ailment), and Askeyami lijagered (An ugly girl).3 Yegetem Gubae (Panel of Poetry) was held every Thursday evening at the Creative Arts Center until 1969, when the president of the university, Kassa Wolde Mariam, shut down what had become an electrifying platform for young and charged poets such as Tsegaye Gebremedhin, Yohannes Admassu, and Gebre Kristos Desta. The final curtain was drawn when Yohannes Admassu read a provocative poem against the regime to thunderous applause: Lam esat weledech bere kend aweta (A cow gave birth to fire and a bull grew a horn) Beseltan leek mehon yehem ale leka (What an anomaly! Erudite? What pretense! Simply because one is seated in power) The nightlife in the alehouses and brothels of Woube Bereha4—a district known for its bars, nightclubs, and bordellos—was extensively documented by novelist Sebhat Gebreegzabher in works such as Leytum aynegalign (The night will never be over for me) (1964). In sumptuous language and with a spectacular sensibility that humanized prostitutes with provocative suggestions of gender performativity, Sebhat exposed the desired passion for brothel houses.5 For him, Woube Bereha was a place unlike any other. It was a space where the politics of gender were transformed and traditional

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images of femininity were challenged and negotiated. Sebhat’s spatiality in Woube Bereha was populated with unpretentious citizens: prostitutes, nightlife aficionados, students, professors, and many others, all of whom were engaged in urgent cultural, nationalist discourses. Sebhat also wrote about his artist friends. In A Cup of Tea with Skunder (date unknown),6 he talked about the peculiarities, charm, and appeal of Skunder Boghossian. Tesfantastic (1968) is an essay on the actor Tesfaye Gessese, about whom Sebhat wrote: When Tesfa is in the mood, one expression on his features, one gesture of his hands, one word or noise from his mouth (or throat) all these gestures simultaneously can give you a perfectly clear, cinematic picture of subjects as varied as a bomb, a fly, a sunset, a woman, an elephant, a beehive, the Middle East situation, a kilo of butter, or whatever may be flirting across the bizarre landscape of his mind.7 Addis Reporter (1968–73)

Solomon Deressa’s significant contribution to the era’s art and culture was principally published in Addis Reporter, which was a weekly magazine when it was first established in 1968 but later changed to monthly editions. The magazine had a commanding editorial team in prominent modern literary figures such as Bealu Girma and Gedamu Abraha, who served as the editor in chief and consulting editor, respectively, and who both received their graduate degrees in journalism from institutions in the United States, Michigan State University for Bealu and Northwestern University for Gedamu. In “The Hyphenated Ethiopian,” one of the most celebrated articles of the period, published in Addis Reporter in February 1969, Gedamu Abraha and Solomon Deressa addressed the complexities of modern personhood. (Known for his provocative style, Gedamu was a frequent contributing columnist for the magazine in addition to serving as its consulting editor.) The article began with an excerpt from T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday”: “This is the time of tension between dying and birth, the place of solitude where three dreams cross.”8 In their politically engaged argument, Solomon and Gedamu reflected on modern subjectivity:

The hyphenated Ethiopian of this age of research and sanitation is also living in an age of anxiety, an age of tension. . . . How has this ego fared under the assaults of new strains, new worries and new anxieties? Is the uneasy complaint one hears about the deterioration of cultural values, the invasion of “bad” alien cultures, or the immutability of the national way of life, a convenient “waiver” to assuage one’s guilt feelings, one’s uncertainty about individual and national identity? . . . True, the Technological Revolution and the international monopoly of western industries have seen to it that the people of the third world—at least the hyphenated ones—shall wear western clothes (bras, panties, dinner jackets and cuff links), eat western food, drink western beverages (coke and scotch) their unthinking, pliant and permanent consumers and clients. And is such a status, we wonder an improvement? . . . But we rather suspect that the scene which we so breezily dismiss as banal may contain within it a lesson, a germ of truth, if not on the condition of man as such, then at least on the conditioned man.9 In taking up critical concerns such as citizenship, selfhood, and identity, “The Hyphenated Ethiopian” provoked the modernist polities of the time. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961), Solomon and Gedamu called the new Ethiopian modern subject “a bourgeoisie in spirit only”10 and a “bourgeoisie of the civil service.”11 These two writers were part of an intellectual circle that emphasized the urgency of a sociopolitical renaissance. “The Ethiopia that this new breed of writers knew,” said literary scholar Yonas Admassu, “was not the Ethiopia of legend; that land of milk and honey which countless writers including Samuel Johnson had written about. . . . If anything, it was a dismal reality punctured all over with poverty, disease, ignorance, oppression and exploitation. . . . It needs no overstating that this generation’s belief was that things must change, and in quite a radical way.”12 Amid a vibrant intellectual exchange that sought to anchor modern identity, Addis Reporter also published a range of articles expressing anxieties over “modern elite” culture. Largely perplexed by how cultural elites established and reproduced the nature of contemporary life, many writers

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contested these elites’ passive responses to Western cultural impositions. One central male preoccupation that provoked widespread tension and agitation was women’s dressed bodies, in attire such as the miniskirt that was popular at the time. Fashion and its impact on feminine identity enraged even as it enthralled male journalists, contributors, and readers. The debate on this topic, which often excluded the effect of fashion in constituting modern masculine identities, generally objectified women in a discourse that essentially imagined and defined the female body as the sanitized object of the patriarchal gaze. In this regard, one writer, Major Getachew Haile, claimed that “women change their fashion in accordance with the tastes and reactions of men.”13 Still another, W. S. Fanta, wrote, “I suggest the only way we can emancipate our culture or wipe out the lovers of minis from the street of Addis is by flogging each and every girl with a mini on the street by saying yemaryam telat (enemy of St. Mary). This, I hope may reduce the infiltration of mini.”14 An issue that was debated in Addis Reporter for an extended period of time, women’s embodied practices also galvanized student protests in 1968. Opposing Western cultural influences, students at Haile Selassie I University demonstrated on the streets of Addis Ababa over a campus-based fashion show that featured the miniskirt. The rally turned violent when police attempted to break the picket lines. In addition to the critiques of women’s fashion that stirred numerous debates, Solomon Deressa’s column “The Amharic Dime Novel,” which reviewed modern short stories, equally animated the literary community with its style and savvy. And often, artists such as Abdelrahman Sheriff and Wendy Kindred, who both taught at the Fine Art School, added images to the articles of the day. For instance, for “The Hyphenated Ethiopian,” Kindred sketched four Ethiopian oval faces with four flags that bore the insignias “Made in Canada,” “Made in the USA,” “Made in France,” and “Made in England,”15 suggesting the multiple displacements of a modern identity that was hyphenated in numerous respects. With a remarkably erudite and cosmopolitan imagination, the writers of Addis Reporter created a discursive space that appealed to readers interested in the real and imagined platforms of modernism. What is troubling, nonetheless, is the writers’ most problematic disregard for and omission of pertinent and crucial issues such as the peripheral position of women, despite their claims to protect the rights of the disenfranchised and oppressed classes. Clearly, the writings of the period broadly situated women in a set

of images rooted in layers of masculine tradition. Besides the deliberations on the miniskirt, Addis Reporter published numerous insulting articles on women, including “Yetemarech tehun weys denkoro?” (Should she be educated or ignorant?), which asked whether educated women could maintain good households and whether it was wiser to marry an “ignorant” woman, who presumably would be better at managing the domestic side of life. The radical oppositional stances the writers maintained often were abstract and lacked clear referents. Some originally sought to identify the conditions of contemporary political and cultural life to respond to the country’s societal, economic, and political complications but without making a compelling case for alternatives. And in their attempt to introduce aspirations into the cultural landscape, they were severely challenged by a people whose accumulated experiences were far distant from the intellectuals’ ideological fantasies. Others denounced the hegemonic structures of Eurocentric exclusions without exploring the meaning and scope of uneven cultural exchanges. For instance, although Gedamu and Solomon referred to Western humanist authors such as T. S. Elliot in “The Hyphenated Ethiopian” to signal the displacement of the modern subject, they did not consider the transcultural politics of European literature; instead, they relegated these authors to what Edward Said referred to as “a different department of that of culture, culture being the elevated area of activity in which they ‘truly’ belong and in which they did their really important work.”16 What they failed to address, consequently, were the scope and the complexities of their histories, which more often than not lacked acknowledgment in the European literary imagination. Similarly, though they referred to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, they abstained from confronting the effects of colonialism on the psyche of the colonized. Fanon demanded both literal and psychic decolonization, contending that it was impossible to construct identity away from the colonial gaze. For Fanon, colonialism was established by military violence and economic coercion, and it ultimately was sustained by cultural and psychological means. The Wretched of the Earth thus analyzed the psychologies of the colonized and called for a radical break from colonial culture. It discarded the hypocrisy of European humanism and argued for a revolutionary consciousness. However, this type of colonizer-colonized awareness was dubiously negotiated in the intellectuals’ field of exchange, even though

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the period’s layers of complexity were precisely marked by such tension and intersection. Despite their provocative postures, the authors of Addis Reporter eventually fell victim to their own inability to convey to the wider public the unique views that they so powerfully addressed. Their impassioned, cosmopolitan literature only spoke to a limited reading audience—composed of two types of readers but fundamentally a small total number, especially in relation to the levels of literacy in English. The first group was a small cadre of intellectual elites who understood the governing epistemology that was behind the publication’s linguistic expressivity and philosophical substance. This group praised the magazine with the same eloquence that the publication itself offered, permeating the space between their own consciousness and that of their contemporaries. The second group largely comprised students and graduates of Haile Selassie I University as well as those who were educated in Ethiopia and abroad and were in the workforce as engineers, lawyers, and economists. This group of readers routinely responded to the magazine’s disparate uses of words and language and to the complex style and blend in the wide-ranging discourses the publication covered. They critiqued the authors’ refined literary language as a fantasy play in which the authors described issues in terms of their own proficiency in the English language. Briefly put, the worthy debates and issues that the publication featured became something distant from and irrelevant to this particular set of readers. The problem was pointed out by several readers in the “Readers’ Corner” section of the magazine, where many expressed their distaste for certain articles. For example, Tilahun Abbay wrote: “Some of the articles seem to be directed at a selected few who have mastered the English language. The Hyphenated Ethiopian, to cite an instance, is written in such a manner that people would find it hard to grasp the contents of the article without having an introduction to, or perhaps a thorough knowledge of psychology. Moreover, the pompous style of writing makes it hardly comprehensible.”17 Akalu Negewo observed, “ I would not hesitate to express my dislike about the unnecessary hard words (bombastic words) you are using,”18 and Abera Wolde Tsadik, who inscribed the word hyphenated under his name, said, “Whether or not the authors (probably made in somewhereville, US) were writing for a limited number of readers, and you were publishing the article for least circulation of your magazine, there were more words I have to refer

to the dictionary to in this article than in a year’s issues of another weekly magazine (Newsweek) or monthly (Ramparts).”19 Addis Reporter was, indeed, inundated with letters, particularly after it featured “The Hyphenated Ethiopian”—to the point that the editors stated, “So many, in fact that we are having a hard time catching up with publishing our flood of mail.”20 And what about the population this magazine was not designed to reach—the larger public that could not read and write English or Amharic? Considering the magazine’s limited circulation and bearing in mind that most Ethiopians did not read or write Amharic, let alone English, the publication was removed from the public eye and from broader relevance. According to the Ministry of Education, only 20 percent of school-age Ethiopians were enrolled in primary schools in the 1960s.21 One can therefore deduce that the wider population, about whom most of the writers in the publication were concerned, were excluded from Addis Reporter’s exchanges and dialogue. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s analogy, the sentences of these writers subsequently evolved to simple “utterances,” rather than actually shaping and forming the exchanges as they were being made. As a result, the writers’ remarkable and authoritative voices were significantly confined to revelries among the authors themselves and with the small group of reading elites who were enamored of the ideas that the magazine projected. Turning more directly to the second type of readers I mentioned—those who read the magazine but frequently did not quite comprehend the ideas behind the texts—we find at various points in the “Readers’ Corner” that the relationship between a public that wanted specificity and writers who opted for abstraction was marked by a striking tension. In consequence, the more pressing issues addressed by the authors were taken up against a social background and consciousness that was not ready for this type of deliberation. Most importantly, Addis Reporter also alienated the intellectual base of the 1920s discussed in chapter 1. Just like the intellectuals of the 1960s, the writers of the 1920s were challenged at a critical moment of the country’s history. As Yonas Admassu wrote: It is the dismal reality of poverty and backwardness that the country represented when it crossed the threshold of the twentieth century a hundred years ago, and still had nothing significant to show for it all. This is what ailed the early twentieth century writers who voiced their concerns directly . . . or

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indirectly through fictional works in the didactic tradition. Granted, as they seemed to say, that its past had been as glorious as it could never have been, but where did it all go? Where did we miss the turn that other nations were quick to recognize and embark on, leaving us out in the cold, while we its children, still boast of the thirteen months of sunshine in which we alone seem to bask?22 The intellectuals of the 1920s were enthralled by modern infrastructure, but they questioned the encounters with the West and its potential hegemony. And just like the authors of “The Hyphenated Ethiopian,” they examined the strategy of change within the ideals of modernity. But the values they subsequently advanced were rejected by of the new discourse—and sometimes with disparaging remarks. For instance, in his critique of the Amharic dime novel that had inundated the literary market, Solomon Deressa wrote, “There has been such a hue and cry in the papers lately about how the foreign educated Ethiopian no longer reads his own literature (as if our fathers really read Ethiopian literature, or anything for that matter).”23 In the article “Non Sequitur,” which was also published in 1969, Solomon Deressa and Gedamu Abraha discussed “Ethiopian doggedness, an aversion to change, an abhorrence of new things and new-fangled ideas of a new arrangement of the scheme of things,” adding that “our circular history has shaped us. We cannot be otherwise.”24 Such dislike of the past was frequently posited in the publication, and the larger condition of “The Hyphenated Ethiopian” that was invented in the 1960s embodied a social formation that was increasingly alienated and dislocated. Yet the history of thought, the essential interreliance of ideas, or the uneven openings and closures of progress that informed the article were rarely engaged. In a collection of poems entitled Zebet elfitu wolelotat, which means making fun of what you shouldn’t make fun of, published in 1997, Solomon Deressa reconsidered his earlier beliefs with new cynicism by distinguishing the vestiges of earlier assumptions. As he put it: Without it coming from outside it was never the truth or knowledge We can’t go back to our mother’s womb, buried without being dead Our endless saga will never cease

Let me fence my heart so I would not be burdened with its baggage Addiction it is from above that maneuvers the underneath Never to be refurbished by the sheer power Of economy or politics What did we lose? What did we not realize? Stripped of freedom for thousands of years Only to be custodians for tourists Solomon Deressa, excerpt from “Tarik new” (History is) (Translation mine)25 It was in retrospect that Solomon implied writers did not understand the complexities of the change they imagined. Yet they succeeded in creating an electrifying space for intellectual debate. Equally significant is the fact that, at the most fundamental level, the magazine was extremely crucial for providing the central dogmas of dissent, however obscure and contentious its views were. At a time of great disillusionment for the modern intellectual, the views that were expressed in Addis Reporter were a catalyst to the widespread political movements of the 1960s in complex and contingent ways. Initially led by the students of Haile Selassie University whose relationship to these intellectuals was intense, though contentious at times, the movements eventually culminated in the uprising of 1974. Even if the intellectuals’ views did not reach a wider public, they were intellectuals in the Gramscian sense as they emerged—perhaps for the first time in Ethiopian modern intellectual history—in a vociferous and enthusiastic oppositional voice to protest the prevailing political orthodoxy and dogma. What was important, then, is that Addis Reporter impelled the intellectuals of the 1960s to welcome the possibility of urgent change. The magazine was one forum where the promises of progress were imagined, debated, and cautioned. Much of the literature that was produced in the 1960s invoked similar wide-ranging interrogation. The 1960s in Context

For Africa, the 1960s were a time of transition from colonial rule. Artists, writers, and activists came into being during this exuberant period

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of political resistance, when Africans refused to continue to submit to colonial authority. One should also contextualize events in Ethiopia. First, there was the attempted coup of 1960 that discredited the emperor and set the precedent for later movements. The coup was orchestrated by Brigadier Mengistu Neway, who was the commander of the Imperial Bodyguard, and his brother Germame Neway. Second, there was the 1962 annexation of Eritrea into the Ethiopian empire,26 which gave rise to several underground movements. “Similar challenges had arisen from Somalia,” Andreas Eshete noted, “with the establishment of a liberation movement seeking self-determination for Somalis inhabiting the Ogaden region.”27 And third, as scholars such as Fikru Gebrekidan have argued, pan-Arab radicalism also contributed to the destabilization of national unity and encouraged the emperor to rally African support. According to Fikru: While the Middle East and North Africa were under colonial rule, Ethiopians had little to fear from their Arab neighbors. Egyptian independence in 1952 ended this equilibrium. The transformation of Cairo as a center of Pan-Arab radicalism under the revolutionary leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser had direct repercussions: it stoked Somali irredentism as well as secessionist sentiments among Muslim Eritreans. Nasser’s exclusion of Addis Ababa from the Nile waters talks with Sudan, the basis of two major bilateral agreements in 1956 and 1959, further demonstrated that Ethiopia’s future lay with subSaharan Africa and not with Arab Africa.28 Because of all these threats against sovereignty, the years just before and after the founding of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) saw Ethiopian foreign policy makers enthusiastically engaging in contemporary pan-African themes and what Fikru called “Ethiopia’s Africanization process.”29 The high prestige given to Ethiopia through the early history of pan-Africanism was reaffirmed with the founding of the OAU, the mastermind being none other than the country’s eminent leader, Emperor Haile Selassie I. He had already gained recognition among Africans both on the continent and in the New World for his struggle against the Fascist occupation of Ethiopia. Pan-African luminaries had overwhelmingly opposed the 1936 Italian occupation of Ethiopia, most notably C. L. R. James, who

served as chairman of the International Friends of Abyssinia, founded in 1935 to rally support against Italian aggression in Ethiopia; Jomo Kenyatta was honorary secretary of this group, and Amy Ashwood Garvey (wife of Marcus Garvey) served as treasurer. The OAU was established, and Addis Ababa became its seat when Emperor Haile Selassie brought together two rival factions—the Casablanca and Monrovia groups. The former advocated the immediate political union of newly independent African states, whereas the latter campaigned for a gradual regional economic affiliation that would ultimately result in unification. Addis Ababa hosted African activists of this period and also witnessed the birth of a cosmopolitan culture. For instance, a scholarship program was established to bring African students from recently independent states to Addis Ababa for higher education, following up on a pledge made at the 1958 conference of independent African states, convened by Kwame Nkrumah in Accra. The extended negotiation processes that preceded the founding of the OAU had also brought African and pan-African groups to the city in significant numbers, and this influx continued throughout the 1960s. Indeed, Addis Ababa in that decade attracted the best of African intellectual thinkers. Meanwhile, African American and West Indian scholars and visitors began to be involved with Haile Selassie I University. These included, among many others, the Trinidadian prime minister Eric Williams, the Howard University professor and Haile Selassie Prize winner William Leo Hansberry, the anthropologist William Shack, and the African American activist Malcolm X. Political support was also extended to African freedom fighters in countries that had not yet gained independence. For instance, in 1962 a group of African National Congress (ANC) recruits, including Nelson Mandela, arrived in Ethiopia to be trained in guerrilla warfare.30 In addition, efforts were made to promote Ethiopia’s pan-African image in the social sphere, and introducing things African into social life became fashionable in Addis Ababa. Names of bars and nightclubs reflected the pan-African cadence of the period, in designations such as Uhuru Bar, Kilimanjaro Bar, and Jomo Kenyatta Bar. Other popular pubs were named after African heroes, such as the Patrice Lumumba Bar.31 Addis Ababa also drew savant black musicians and artists from the continent and the New World. The sounds of freedom echoed in the city during this unprecedented time of hope, optimism, and incredible possibility for black people.

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It became clear that the historical imagination of Ethiopia that had once depicted the country as an emblem of pride for Africans, both on the continent and in the New World, had returned to the fore in the 1960s. But it was a paradoxical imagination indeed because Ethiopian artists and intellectuals rarely engaged their African origins, whereas other Africans on the continent and in the New World gave Ethiopia high prestige as a symbol of black consciousness. As Andreas Eshete remarked: “It is an irony that Ethiopia’s international valorization commanded little public knowledge or presence within Ethiopia. It could be said that others, not Ethiopians, were the ardent believers in the pan African myths about Ethiopia, myths with worldwide currency.”32 Scholars such as Ali Mazrui have also written about the country’s dubious relationship to pan-Africanism. Mazrui claimed that Ethiopia was always “in denial about its blackness.”33 He said that even W. E. B. Du Bois, who believed in Ethiopia’s symbolic importance, was challenged in Ethiopia’s attendant vision of blackness. Mazrui stated that it was in this regard that Du Bois wrote, in 1935, “[Abyssinians] are as Negroid as American Negroes. If there is a black race they belong to it. Of course there are not and never were any ‘pure’ Negroes any more than there are ‘pure’ whites or ‘pure’ yellows. Humanity is mixed to its bones. But in the rough and practical assignment of mankind to three divisions, the Ethiopians belong to the black race.”34 Writing on the “profound paradox” of Ethiopia’s cultural history,35 Mazrui said, “On the one hand, Ethiopians were a Black people who could successfully refute Western allegations that Black Africans were incapable of making history, of writing poetry, of philosophizing, or of pursuing the scientific method. Objectively, Ethiopians were a Black people, but subjectively they were in denial about their Blackness until Emperor Haile Selassie redefined their identity in the twentieth century.”36 Surely, Ethiopianists had historically defined the country’s cultural and historical identities in terms of Ethiopia’s links with the Middle East, and the academic image of Ethiopia had been what historian Teshale Tebebu described as “in but not of Africa.”37 But contrary to Ali Mazrui’s sweeping assumption about Ethiopia’s “denial of blackness” and Haile Selassie’s redemptive action to refute this disavowal, I would argue that a popular consciousness of “Africanness” had, perhaps for the first time, surfaced in the public sphere during the 1960s. This in turn influenced, albeit dubiously, student activism and a spirit of

dissent among artists and writers. The popular culture of the period most emphatically affirmed this sensibility. However, it is also true that most of the literary intellectuals, activists. and visual artists that I examine in this work rarely recognized the political validity of black consciousness while they were condemning age-old prejudices and injustices, including the hegemonic culture of the West. Perhaps this was because young Ethiopian writers, artists, and activists were not politicized in the same political contexts that produced the anticolonial and independence movements. Consequently, it is important to fathom how these artists, writers, and activists negotiated their ideas and practices with other Africans who were engaged in the struggle for self-determination if we want to comprehend their strategies of resistance against imperial hegemony. Who Were the Intellectuals of the 1960s?

Immediate products of Emperor Haile Selassie’s education policy, the intellectuals of the 1960s fell into two groups: those who were mostly educated in the West with direct sponsorship by the state and who returned to Ethiopia determined to modernize their country; and those who were graduates or current students of Haile Selassie I University. Intellectuals in the first group followed a reformist policy. They included figures such as Ketema Yifru, a graduate of Boston University who served as foreign minister (1961–70) and then minister of industry, commerce, and tourism (1971–74); Aklilu Habtewold, who was educated at Sorbonne University in France and served as foreign minister (1947–58), then prime minister (1961–74); and Seyoum Haregot, a graduate of Harvard Law School and minister of state (1966–74). These individuals believed that effective change would eventually come through the political arrangement described as a “constitutional monarchy.” According to Seyoum Haregot, Prime Minister Aklilu Habtewold particularly believed in “[making] his office a more effective vehicle of change responsive to the needs of society.”38 In The Bureaucratic Empire, Serving Emperor Haile Selassie (2013), Seyoum wrote about the 1955 Revised Constitution, which was designed from the vantage point of the Kebra Nagast (Glory of the Kings), a document that legitimated the Solomonic dynasty. Seyoum said that this document reflected “a notion of government that we had long labored to transform so that it could accommodate different political institutions,”39 even

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as it recognized the emperor as the rightful protector of the nation. The monarchy had historically exercised all legislative, executive, and judicial power. The state’s legitimacy rested on the defining features of the nation, which presented itself as the historic extension of divine kings and queens. “The rising expectations of the common man,” wrote Seyum, “had to be met by introducing universal suffrage in the new constitution.”40 The monarchy was also forced to consider the circumstances of the 1960s, including the collapse of global colonialism and particularly the new independence of formerly colonized African states (Emperor Haile Selassie was in the vanguard of that movement), as well as the rise of the educated elite that threatened imperial sovereignty. In this regard, the emperor gave much attention to projects of modernization to relieve the political complications of imperial ideology. But rhetoric needed to be followed by a pragmatic return, and the emperor’s ambition to modernize the country, with his imperial hegemony intact, became increasingly illusory. The country was hardly seen to be changing. What is more, rampant poverty laid bare the urgent need for change. In addition, the fall of global colonialism and the fact that Addis Ababa had become the seat of African independence shaped new social identities and fanned hopes for a brighter future. Consequently, artists, writers, and students who challenged the myth of the nation emerged. A major emphasis in this chapter is placed on the second group of intellectuals—the artists, writers, and activists whose beliefs ran contrary to constitutional monarchy and who fundamentally changed the course of modern Ethiopian history. This group intervened in a new politics of knowledge that sought to reconfigure the long and interwoven relationship between the state and imperial ideology. Unlike the Berhanena Selam writers who believed in the compatibility of monarchy and citizenship and who thought that intertwining modernity with traditional values and practices could quell modernity’s uncertain quest, this new group of students, artists, and writers concentrated on subverting the dominant ideological structures of society. But even in the earliest days of dissension against the state, a lack of clarity about the nature of colonialism and its effects was very apparent among this generation of thinkers. Fragmented pieces of colonial consciousness emerged, but the larger politics of colonial exploitation was rarely addressed. For instance, Endih New (This is it), the arts and literature magazine of the University College, was established by students primarily so they could

express their thoughts in Amharic, contrary to previous student publications that were written in English. The magazine was launched by Berhane Meskel Redda, one of the founders of the Marxist-Leninist movement—the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Party (EPRP)—in the late 1960s. Endih New had a commanding editorial team that included Yonas Admassu, Getachew Haile, Amsalu Aklilu, and Dagnachew Worku, who all became literary giants after their student years. This editorial team wrote about the decision to launch the magazine: Four years ago, there was the University College’s magazine called the “UC Journal.” There is also a current magazine called “Something” that was established two years ago. In between these two English written magazines appeared some short lived Amharic magazines. It is when we saw these unpleasant circumstances in the use of our language that we decided to establish this magazine. . . . The main reason for establishing this magazine is to allow students to articulate their thoughts in their own language. . . . And we students of the university, also have an obligation to nurture our own literatures, a literature that emerged from its own writing scripts and adorned with beautiful parchments by our forefathers is a grand heritage. We are obliged not only to maintain this rich heritage, but also to nurture it and pass it on to the next generation.41 Students recognized the value of preserving their own language, but the use of Amharic as opposed to English—that is, the relationship of Amharic to the imposed language of English—was more implicit than deliberately exercised. But it is also crucial to state that students were not entirely without concern for the fundamental antecedents of African colonial and postcolonial political conditions. For example, students of Haile Selassie I University supported and rallied for independence struggles such as those of the Mau Mau of Kenya and the movement against apartheid in South Africa. And individuals such as Tsegaye Gebremedhin, one of the most prominent playwrights and poets of the 1960s, acknowledged the importance of the pan-Africanist ideology in his publications and routinely referred to his friendship with Leopold Sedar Senghor and Cheikh Anta Diop. In 1971, he was awarded a Visiting Research Fellowship in African

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Cultural Antiquities at the University of Dakar (now Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar). Yet he was also preoccupied with adapting Shakespeare’s plays—among many, Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth. Although he had written several indigenous plays and many more after the 1974 revolution that reflected the revolt,42 Tsegaye is popularly known for his adaptations of Shakespearean dramas. Impelled by the politicization of the 1960s, young intellectuals such as Tsegaye also published extracts of pan-Africanist ideology, but the fragments they published constituted not so much the themes of African unity. Their reading of pan-Africanism rejected the ideologies philosophical roots that could never apply to Ethiopia’s history, while at the same time, it valued what the ideology meant to the rest of the continent. For instance, in Literature and the African Public (1967), Tsegaye’s pan-Africanist views and his critical apprehension were strikingly fragmented. In his attempt to theorize African literature and its relationship to the colonial languages of French and English, Tsegaye wrote, “Before we come to the question of where does African literature stand . . . I would like to digress for a moment and consider it under more detached questions. What in concrete terms are the languages that should make ‘African literatures’ and what in appraising these literatures is the commitment of a writer to a given society.”43 He critiqued the colonial condition and how colonialism produced constraints to mother languages, which he called a “dilemma of realities.”44 He suggested that “by the use of English and French, the nearest we achieve would be an Africanized English or an Africanized French.”45 He also wrote about the East-West contention (between communism and capitalism) that Africa was forced to join. He argued that the African generation that was trying to find itself within this condition had produced a form of “modern angry expression . . . a theory, an image, each in his own Africanness, differing in the interpretation of his national or local heritage and experience. . . . [S]everal theories have already been formed, either out of well-meaning intentions like Negritude, Pan Africanism, or out of sinister motives like Apartheid. They fit into the matter of each politician, writer, critic or racial supremacist.”46 Was Tsegaye peculiarly proposing that negritude and apartheid were born simply of anger? What his point made clear was the troubling convergence and comparison between the forms of power that produced the injurious racism of apartheid and the vital beliefs of personhood and

citizenship that negritude demanded. Perhaps even more interesting was his assertion that Ethiopia had never been disturbed by such an exigency: Ethiopia is one of those who has been lucky in this context, in that the best that has been thought and said to quite an extent have through the centuries been recorded and expressed in the languages of her heritage, in the literature of her own script since 800 B.C., first in Ge-ez, Tigre-Tegregna, and finally in Amharic (all languages of wide scope respectively and not mere dialects as some western misconceptionists consider them to be), and all derivatives of the same Ge-ez root, a most ancient script of one of Ethiopia’s earliest people, the Ag-Azi of the time old Adulis, Beha and Axum cities whose ruins still stand depicting the country’s historic and cultural backbone.47 After arguing that parochialism might not be the way forward, Tsegaye urged African writers to incorporate current realities into their circumstances without abandoning what was truly theirs. He concluded disturbingly by citing Benjamin Franklin: “As we must account for every idle word we must account for every other silence.”48 Even more than to the writings of the intellectuals of Addis Reporter, it is to Tsegaye’s texts and plays that we should return if we want to comprehend the bewildered conceptions by which the ideas of Africanity or colonial consciousness were conceived. It is particularly important to study his work because scholars intimately link that work to African consciousness. Yet perhaps the extent to which colonial theory informed the sources and concepts of Tsegaye’s work is open to debate. The most comprehensive deliberation on pan-Africanism was written in 1964 by Kifle Wodajo, in Pan Africanism: The Evolution of an Idea.49 Kifle, a politician and diplomat who served as the first secretary-general of the Organization of African States, reflected on the champions of panAfricanism and on the politics of the ideology. Drawing attention to the ways in which colonialism fashioned an African reality, Kifle assigned a different meaning to Ethiopia’s association to the colonial legacy and to the ideology of pan-Africanism. Isolating Ethiopia from the multiple movements of pan-Africanism, he argued that the extraordinary effort of the movement, which Ethiopia was not part of, had peaked with the founding of the OAU. In this regard, he gave Ethiopia a leading role and acclaimed

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the moral values of Emperor Haile Selassie, who was pivotal in establishing that organization. However, Kifle ignored issues of colonial political identity and its relationship to Ethiopia. Still, Pan Africanism: The Evolution of an Idea is probably the most complete and coherent account of the pan-Africanist concept, certainly among those written by Ethiopian intellectuals in the 1960s, and it is also one of the few that eloquently featured the charged and diverse approaches to the question of pan-African identity. But like many of the intellectuals of the period, Kifle extended the meaning of pan-Africanism to a broader foundation of humanism. In fact, it is precisely this disposition of exclusivity in political and human solidarity that informed the relationship between Ethiopian and other African intellectuals during the 1960s. Ethiopian writers, artists, and activists wanted to struggle for African independence and liberation, but they rarely recognized the transnational and intercultural significance that a cohesive co-optation and appropriation of other African colonial experiences might have conveyed. And to date, the real cultural foundations of a shared experience have not informed aesthetic politics and Ethiopian expressive forms. I must also note the intellectuals’ multiple engagements with Ethiopian politics and culture, if in inadvertent and diverging ways. Whereas artists and writers immediately sought democratic values and rights on a more conceptual level, students at Haile Selassie I University fought for radical change with an ideology they believed responded to the flagrant inequalities confronting the nation. The vast inequalities in Ethiopian life spurred an extraordinarily urgent upheaval and drove a determined agenda to mobilize an entire citizenry. By the late 1960s, the student movement emerged as Marxist opposition. Activists focused on landlord-peasant relations and avowed their struggle was rooted in class. They advocated a violent revolutionary fight to establish a people’s government. Their paper, Struggle, called for an uprising against the imperial regime. As Andreas Eshete, one of the founders of the Ethiopian Student Movement, wrote, “Socialism provided a powerful weapon for exorcising our received selfimage, thereby enabling a decisive defiance of absolutist public authority as well as the debilitating claims of inherited class and cultural privilege.”50 For Andreas, liberation thus meant wiping out what was “deeply defined as our collective identity.”51 In their push for immediate social change stimulated by the independence movements, the students were

also largely supported by artists and writers. They questioned democratic human rights and demanded social justice and the emancipation of individuals and society from exploitation and political oppression, both in their publications and in protests held on the university campus. This radical group challenged Emperor Haile Selassie’s rhetoric of “official nationalism,” whereby Ethiopian sovereignty was paradoxically reduced to the imperial ideology of the state and the imperial institutionalization of Ethiopian nationalism. In 1969, Walelign Mekonnen (1945–1972),52 a militant student at Haile Selassie I University, brought to the forefront a controversial proposition on the question of nations and nationalities. Drawing on the Bolshevik philosophy that advocated the rights of nationalities to political secession from the oppressing nation, Walelign argued that Ethiopia was not one nation but rather a collection of nations and nationalities whose citizenship was defined under a hegemonic Amhara nationality. In Theses on the National Question (1921), V. I. Lenin had stated: “But insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois nationalism, we stand against. We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressor nation, and do not in any way condone strivings for privileges on the part of the oppressed nation.”53 Parallel to Lenin’s treatise, Walelign proposed the unconditional rights of Ethiopia’s nations and nationalities for self-determination and incorporated the Stalinist position “including and up to cessation.”54 In Africa, the notion of self-determination was particularly central in contexts of decolonization, in which claims to sovereignty for newly independent states gained greater currency. But the Ethiopian students used strategies that differed from those of their African counterparts who routinely converged in Addis Ababa, and they advocated for the Stalinist proposition that if the proletariat was to safeguard the support of the masses, it had to defend the oppressed nations’ right to secede. “It is the duty of every revolutionary to question whether a movement is Socialist or reactionary not whether a movement is secessionist or not,” wrote Walelign Mekonnen. “In the long run, socialism is internationalism and a socialist will never remain secessionist for good.”55 A highly controversial stance, Walelign’s critical position challenged—perhaps openly for the first time, although it was previously alluded to in the literary and visual articulations of writers and artists—the naturalized unity of the Ethiopian nation, not to mention its divinity as delineated in the Kebra Nagast.

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The fantasies and layers of “imagined community” that constituted the nation and the ways the nation was presented not only as the primary source of loyalty and solidarity but also as the rallying image in the discourse of modernity were consequently put into question. This issue continues to unsettle contemporary interpretations of nationalism. The frames of reference and interpretative strategies for a common understanding of the nation have ever since been problematic, when in contemporary times every ethnic group threatens to secede and the ideological narratives of multiple national identities are finding it difficult to coexist. To militant students, the economic deprivation of preindustrialized societies was an integral part of the problems they rose to address. They agreed that the institution of capitalism that was brought by colonialism to the colonies had sustained a precapitalist mode in the colonies even after independence, so as to perpetually subordinate these societies to the hegemonic structure of capitalism. Although Ethiopia was never colonized, militants believed that new forms of colonialism had been imposed on the nation by Western imperialism. The relative absence of the industrial proletariat, which Marx said was the leading revolutionary class, made the peasant class a key component in the revolution they envisioned. Since they categorized Ethiopia as a feudo-capitalist structure, the experiences of the Russian and Chinese revolutions were considered extremely relevant. The revolutionaries of Russia and China supposed that the primacy of the working class as a revolutionary agent would ultimately emerge after a peasant-led agrarian revolt. Militants argued that this did not mean subordinated struggles over issues such as race, slavery, ethnicity, and gender should be reduced. But apart from addressing questions related to national minorities, they did not theorize the particular shapes of struggle that structured the multiple and overlapping spaces of oppression such categories produced. For instance, when they comprehended the making and shaping of feudal society and the exploitative relationship between landlord and peasant, the question of slavery (barnet), which was intrinsic in the construction of the Ethiopian feudal structure, was rarely presented. Here, I do not intend to theorize the encounter between Marxism and the noneconomic determinants that classic Marxist theories are said to have diminished, such as race and ethnicity. Such critiques have been widely debated by scholars such as, among many others, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, and Stuart Hall, and they have considered

the development of Marxist theory to fit objective conditions as necessary. But contrary to such understandings, the Marxist theory that was pursued by Ethiopian activists primarily focused on economic theories in which all forms of oppression were simply associated with class relations and structure. In this situation, issues such as the particularities of slavery or other categories of oppression beyond the causal relationship between capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism were marginalized. Even when gender issues were brought to the forefront, perhaps for the first time in Ethiopian history, the analytical tools needed to examine the multiple forms of inequality and oppression were absent. Though the distinct forms of male supremacy were analyzed in contexts of Ethiopian culture, as I note in chapter 4, the parallel between exclusion and the histories of colonialism and imperialism was seldom examined. Obviously, activists of the period hardly deployed a pan-African sensibility, the experiences of the colonial legacy, or strategies of decolonization evoked by writers such as Fanon. Nonetheless, intellectuals’ ambivalence toward pan-African solidarity appears, at first sight, to have resonated with Fanon’s contempt for the national bourgeoisie and adverse sentiments about broad continental movements such as pan-Africanism. In addition to arguing that decolonization could only be completed through a violent uprising, Fanon had emphasized the urgency to build a resilient national identity around indigenous cultures, which had once been overpowered by colonialism. Indeed, Fanon believed the national bourgeoisie that rose in the immediate years after independence was occupied in retrieving the wealth that had formerly been seized by colonialists and was unable to negotiate the terms of decolonization. He stressed that the national bourgeoisie could neither provide capital nor establish an economic channel independent from the appendages of former colonialists. Likewise, Ethiopia’s militant intellectuals expounded the destructive effects of dependent capitalism and believed that it was only through violent uprising that such damage could be mitigated. And in a Leninist reading, they split the bourgeoisie into comprador and national, the first working intimately with foreign investors and multinational corporations in the interest of capital and the latter empathizing with national economic developments; both were deemed advocates of the imperial regime and its reformist policies. Militant intellectuals believed the national bourgeoisie could serve as a tactical partner in the struggle against the oppressive state,

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whereas the comprador bourgeoisie was the enemy of the people because of its cozy alliance with imperialist powers. In a certain way, then, an unfolding cognizance of the history of capitalist consciousness underscored the militant intellectuals’ ideological link to perspectives such as Fanon’s. Yet the broader implication of colonialism that Fanon insisted had obstructed national or cultural identity was rarely negotiated. For Fanon, it was impossible for decolonization to conclude until such conditions were finally affirmed. And it was this fundamental psychological aspect of colonial oppression, which evoked a distinct form of colonial consciousness such as racism, that Ethiopian militant intellectuals failed to interrogate. Instead, these intellectuals saw culture as a reflection of the material or economic world. Concentrating heavily on aspects of economic subjugation, the intellectuals insisted that culture was devoid of any agency of its own—a result of the Marxist materialist interpretation of history. But colonial consciousness did not just imply the analytics of economic superiority. Rather, it required a theoretical framework that depicted the experiences of colonized peoples and cultures within the contexts of colonial history. The extent to which the colonizer generated psychological mind-sets that were essential to position the colonized in a certain status (such as discomfort about its own culture) was seldom examined. This fundamental disregard is an intellectual legacy that still confronts us today. One central point in this regard is that even as intellectuals of the 1960s urgently demanded the institutionalization of participatory democracy and denounced the hegemonic culture and economy of the West, the emphasis they placed on colonial consciousness was negligible; at times, it was even in dispute within the broader framework of intellectual thought. In fact, literatures of African and African diaspora Marxist intellectuals such as C. L. R. James were rarely engaged. Furthermore, whereas Marxist intellectuals were able to illuminate the relationship between colonialism and capitalism, with little consideration that a theory of colonialism should incorporate the awareness of colonial consciousness, artists and writers were simply compelled to express the politics of exclusion. If any discussion of colonialism or the colonial consciousness occurred, it was simply in reference to other African societies. Aside from the student activists, other intellectuals may have had a sense of exceptionalism that emphatically assumed the Ethiopian experience was worlds apart from the colonial experiences of Africa. Projected by

Europeans as Africa’s paradox and anomaly, Ethiopia and its history and culture, as I have indicated elsewhere, were framed by Western scholars in an Orientalist construction that tied Ethiopia to the Middle East rather than to Africa. This orientation was also reproduced by Ethiopian intellectuals, who took pride, disturbingly, in such a distinction. Also privileging northern Ethiopia’s Semitic corporeal features, both real and imagined—a straight nose, thin lips, and the like—scholars associated the Semitic makeup with the Middle East, whereas the features of southern Ethiopia were intimately linked to black Africa. Such a constructed outlook, which implied an absolute definition of Ethiopia as northern Semite in its constitution, had historically marginalized the body of knowledge that comprises the non-Semitic population. Consequently, non-Semites were relegated to the position of non-Ethiopian African Others with real or imagined corporeal differences, and that ultimately reduced the complexities of their histories and cultures. Often invoked in texts rather hazily—but seldom as a defined term—the notion of the non-Semite Other was also conjured in ambiguous frameworks even in progressive intellectual thought. For example, Mengistu Lemma’s “Basha Asheber be America” (Basha Asheber in America) (1964) is a celebrated poem on the experiences of an Ethiopian diplomat in the United States prior to the civil rights movement. The piece attempts to critique the representation of race. Mengistu examines this problem as an outsider, which is a key element in the scheme of the poem. The poem revolves around Basha Asheber, a northern Ethiopian who has suddenly become a racialized subject—a predicament of Otherness that Mengistu implies this man has never experienced prior to traveling to Washington, D.C.56 From the onset, the poem alludes to the conditions and circumstances of the social realities of race in Ethiopia— that is, the distinction between the northern Semitic population and the racialized, non-Semitic Other, who has often been relegated to the margins and whose hierarchal separation has rarely been engaged in the political, cultural, and social agendas of the country. The poem suggests that Basha Asheber is forced to recognize his country’s institutionalized racist standpoint only in the United States and that he is completely unaware of such prejudices in Ethiopia. And the reader is left to wonder whether, on one hand, Mengistu is critiquing such uninterrogated established hierarchies or, on the other hand, he is truly unaware of such racial categories—a situation that presents an equally if not more problematic suspicion about racial

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awareness in intellectual thought. But at the heart of the poem is the diplomat’s confusion on matters of race, something he simply refuses to accept. Not only has he been thrown out of cafés that predominantly cater to white Americans, he also has been beaten and had his his life threatened. “How could this be?” he asks. His identity, which he once thought was privileged and which he describes as “pure as gold,”57 is questioned, mocked, and absolutely devalued. Overwhelmed and destabilized, Basha Asheber finds out that the ambiguous racial lines between him and the rest of the racialized world that he formerly positioned as real have been precipitously transformed. In awe, he abruptly learns about the predicaments of race. And he alludes to the racial prejudices of his own country, problematically redeeming and at the same time arresting the very racial quandary that he has been trying to comprehend. Indeed, the poem evokes the injustices of race in a beautiful range of puns and with great wit. However, it also unproblematically negotiates the peripheral racial, cultural, political, and geographic burden of the Ethiopian racialized ‘Other.’ Thus,even as the poem attempts to understand the racialized subjectivities of the shagole and shankela—derogatory names for certain non-Semitic people from the lowland peripheries who have historically been excluded from the larger narrative of the highland and Christian north—it also objectifies their subjectivities as a “race” in the same stereotypical language that is at the center of the hegemonic Amhara politics. One line of the poem reads as follows: “Yemojaw tewelaj yeterahut menze shagole shankela tebeye meyaze” (How could these white Americans identify me as shagole and shankela when I am born from the Moja tribe and I am a Menze [a privileged Amhara tribe]). In its descriptive vocabulary, the materiality of the language and its pejorative signification denigrate rather than liberate the shagole and shankela—the poet’s primary intent. Though the poem ends with a redemptive phrase, “selecha, kelkelo—kelkelo, selecha” (selecha is a container that is sometimes made of hide, and kelkelo is a food container that is also made of hide), which indicates the likeness of people—black, white, Amhara, shankela, or shagole. However, the poet’s desire to prove equality actually reifies racialization by reproducing the duality of inclusion and exclusion as a real phenomenon. Even in a fairly critical engagement of race such as this poem, Ethiopian exceptionalism is deceptively forged as if to justify “the burden of freedom.”

Known for his exquisitely witty style, Mengistu was perhaps one of the few writers who attempted to critique race and prejudice. Besides “Basha Asheber be America,” his critiques of race included “Sost ken sikerat” (When she had three days left), which is a poem about his love affair with a white woman in London, where he went to school. He told how her family was shocked “to see the devil being painted in their own country.”58 In “Enatena lej” (Mother and child), he wrote about oppression and particularly oppression that came from the “white man’s land.” He referred to these types of oppressors as kemals, or lice.59 Certainly, the works of 1960s intellectuals such as Mengistu Lemma indicated a significant shift from previous imaginaries of inclusion and exclusion. Still, the exclusion of non-Semitic Ethiopians from the larger intellectual critique that surrounded oppression and inequality ultimately raises questions about the nature of black consciousness or black African identity that prevailed. The quandary of the non-Semite Other was also ambivalently positioned in the novels of the 1960s, and it undermined the core issues of inclusion and exclusion that were at the heart of colonial politics. Even in Adefres, which is considered to be the period’s most provocative novel, the character of the slave girl Atahu Worota was shaped in problematic ways. Though the author paid attention to humanizing her character, he did not explore the construction of racially formed peripheral subjectivities, even as he scrupulously investigated other prejudices. The bases for exclusion were generally subordinated to issues of class, particularly by student activists, and the racism and stereotyping rooted in the hegemonic past were to be resolved once the class question was settled. As an alternative, movements of self-determination for national minorities were espoused. Although more recent studies critically reflect on racial origin and slavery in Ethiopia,60 full and comprehensive studies examining racial consciousness and the construction of subjectivities through racial imaginaries are still negligible. Yet it is complicated to position Westernand Black Atlantic–style understandings of color and racial hierarchies in relation to the conceptual categories of Ethiopian racial exclusions. But interrogations of exclusion, such as the one raised here, aid in positioning the age-old prohibitive imaginaries that surfaced, albeit hesitantly, even in militant intellectual thought. This becomes particularly important when strong elements of modern racism are inscribed in the Orientalist historiography of Ethiopia.

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Such was the enigmatic position of the 1960s’ radicalism that contextualized a critical period in Ethiopian modernism’s history. I would like to emphasize that I broach this hypothesis—on Ethiopian intellectuals and their limited engagement with colonial consciousness or the colonial legacy—as more of a provocation to broaden research and as an issue that merits serious scholarly attention. Furthermore, I would note that a considerable number of Ethiopian scholars have extensively engaged in the political contexts of pan-Africanism. For instance, the recent work by Belete Belachew, “Ethiopia in African Politics, 1956–1991” (2012), significantly examined Ethiopia’s involvement “in the affairs of the continent.”61 Belete investigated the nature of Ethiopian contributions in African politics between the years 1956 and 1991. Though the pan-African political context is equally important, my analysis converges on the sensibility and consciousness of pan-Africanism, that is, the unmediated and comprehensive history of colonialism and its relationship to Ethiopia’s peculiar institution, rather than its political framework. Furthermore, my interrogation centers on how this sensibility was positioned by Ethiopian artists, writers, and students, particularly when the classical pan-Africanist ideology was centered on a notion of common origin and common fight. Novels of the Period: Adefres, KeAdmas bashager, and Este teteyeku Adefres

Dagnachew Worku’s Adefres is probably the most provocative novel of the period. Dagnachew received his undergraduate degree in Ethiopian languages and literature from Haile Selassie I University and had just returned from the University of Iowa in the United States after receiving a graduate degree in creative writing when he wrote Adefres. For him, progress was a general project of democratization, liberalization, secularization, and humanization. Yet forging a project of progress that was appropriate for Ethiopia became mere rhetoric and a utopian dream. The main protagonist in the novel is Adefres, who initially applauds the images and sensibilities of European modernity while at the same time critiquing its encroachment on vernacular authority. On the one hand, he talks about the benefits of progress, but on the other, he gets bewildered

about how to shape the political culture that he passionately pursues. Beyond the boundaries of tradition are indefinite institutions, practices, and ideologies, and Adefres confronts and interacts with each and every possibility. The dramatic tension, isolation, and alienation of the modern intellectual build throughout the text. The word adefres means “to disturb” or “to upset” the order of things. Adefres initially considers himself to be progressive and a modernizer, full of contempt for tradition. Later in the novel, though, he finds himself disillusioned and unable to understand the complexities and the multiple histories of his country. He is a student of the University College of Addis Ababa who never left the city until he was assigned by the school to go to Debre Sina to participate in the teaching service in the countryside that was required of students. It is to Debre Sina that Adefres brings his modern education and its epistemic contradictions with traditional values and beliefs. And it is there that Adefres finds out that marginal and fragmented subjects present complexities of history. Although his initial fiery dialogue with the people of Debre Sina challenges established frames, it falls short in negotiating the divide between the West and its relationship to race, people, culture, religion, and history in the non-Western world. Early in the novel, Adefres conveys a single message that emphasizes his deconstructionist approach to traditional values, an approach designed not only to invert the hierarchy but also to explode the values and order implied by the system. For example, he eloquently questions the epistemological foundation of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the church’s various saints’ days. Followers of the Orthodox Church sit idle on the different days of the saints. He says: “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday . . . Lideta, Raguel, Aba Goba, Beata, Yohannes, Wolde Negodgwad, Abuye Tsadiqu, Yesus Kristos, Selassie, Arbaetu Ensesa, Thomas Semaet, Meskele Yesus, Kidist Hannah, Kedus Michael, Egziabher Ab, Abune Aregawi. . . . Life through these days just passes by.”62 He continues to list other holidays, noting the festivities that go along with these occasions and reflecting on the value system surrounding food during these times; he also comments on how life is wasted in a series of concentric circles around frivolous cultural ethos. The novel is largely dialogic between the people of Debre Sina and Adefres. At the heart of the dialogue is the contradictory interpretation of two primary sets of ideas: those of Adefres, who claims to be a modernizer, and those of the

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locals, who have an investment in their fully functional local institutions. Adefres consistently evokes the concepts of “consciousness” and “individuality,” which he thinks traditional beliefs lack. He preaches to the people of Debre Sina on the social reasons and motives for his logic of progress, only to find out that locals instead support the assumptions enshrined in traditional philosophies. He gets agitated when the locals respond to his queries because he finds their responses backward, unprogressive, and downright ignorant. As he puts it: “They are ignorant or they did not understand . . . when I talk about farming, they insist on talking about Brutawit [the character that St. George saves from the dragon].”63 In later evocative chapters, Adefres’s ambivalence clearly surfaces when he unceasingly attempts to embrace European modernity’s tenets while simultaneously rejecting them. Adefres also represents a new Left that had emerged through student activism and that championed a Marxist-Leninist materialist conception of modernity. Adefres’s confusion in later chapters of the book shows this dilemma, particularly when the people of Debre Sina utterly refuse to listen to his rhetoric of progress. His brutal intrusion to annihilate local experiences forecloses the possibility of bringing change, and in the process, this lays bare the flawed and fragile conception of his totalizing ideology. The backlash that he encounters from the indigenous people disillusions him, and he is forced to reassess the idea of the modern. The novel ends with Adefres’s ironic death in a riot of the Ethiopian Student Movement. The cause of his death is ambiguous: the author implies that a stone thrown by one of the rioters hits his head, although Adefres himself is one of the rioters. The reader is left with a sense of a generation’s confusion in its quest for liberty, equality, and fraternity. Adefres’s death jarringly symbolizes the intellectuals’ paradoxical disputes over the nature of progress, their primary contenders being the very citizens that they fought to liberate from exploitation. What is lacking in this most provocative novel of the period is the broader enigma of imperial Europe that was wrought by the exploitative relations and disputes with other cultures. Questions about what this relationship is and how it produces and conserves colonial consciousness on its peripheries are certainly not interrogated. Indeed, in some passages, Adefres seems to be critiquing European modernity. As in Solomon and Gedamu’s “The Hyphenated Ethiopian,” Adefres speaks about the

reinforcement of Western culture and its hegemonic extension, but he falls short of defining how this concept was communicated and exported to the non-West. At the heart of such misreadings by the writers of the 1960s was a desire to create a nation in the nation’s own image, without its historical link to other parts of the non-Western world and particularly its association to the African colonial and decolonial landscape. This kind of understanding neither stimulated the confluence of political values with the rest of the African continent nor facilitated the emergence of real social power within. KeAdmas bashager

Bealu Girma’s KeAdmas bashager (Beyond the horizon) addresses the modern man’s quest for individuality and the relevance of individual consciousness to collective social change. The central theme of Bealu’s novel is a review of both the traditional notion of the self and a modern conception of self and its complicated relations to society and culture. The novel’s central character is Abera, who is educated in the United States and lacks a clear sense of direction or coherent sense of purpose. His pursuit of pleasure is free from moralistic undertones, but he is restless. He is a womanizer who frequently moves from woman to woman and often changes jobs, and according to his brother Ato Abate, he is impatient and impulsive. When Ato Abate complains about Abera’s restiveness, Abera tells him that patience is like “still water that rots and reeks.”64 A central character in the book is Abera’s friend Hailemariam. In Hailemariam, one can see the dichotomy between Western liberalist individuality and local interpretations of selfhood. Hailemariam is obsessed with finding the self that is in continual self-definition and that vacillates between romantic individualism and revolutionary collectivism. For Hailemariam, the individual will and the collective obligation never come together. His conversations always revolve around the interpretation of the autonomous individual—an exasperating concept for Abera’s traditionalist brother, who finds this philosophy a nonviable ideal. In a conversation between Ato Abate and Hailemariam regarding Abera’s impulsiveness and his refusal to marry and settle down, Hailemariam talks about the importance of finding oneself before embarking on societal obligations. Ato Abate gets befuddled and responds by saying, “How could he not know himself when he is the son of the great patriot Fitawrari Worku Bante Yergu whose genes

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are clear like gold and whose generosity and spirituality is known by all? Perhaps the devil that came between me and my brother is symbolized by you.”65 The novel therefore relays the paradox of the modern man’s notion of individuality. Abera and Hailemariam are insistent about individual autonomy, a typical ideal of Western values, which they believe involves freeing themselves from shackles. For them, collectivity deprives the individual of sovereignty. What is at stake, then, is a disputed interpretation based on the premise that selfhood is simply a creation of Western thought. In Ethiopia, however, the idea of the autonomous self has long been a sophisticated conception: the idea that individuals make themselves and their societies and that individuality by analogy comes principally through social relationships. But in Bealu’s novel, the colonial framework robs the colonized from its own agency. What is most interesting in this novel is also the nature of the imposed framework and the bewilderment it causes. No matter how much Abera tries to detach himself from the interdependent self, the essence of his personhood continues to be derived from relations with others. This is articulated in Abera’s turbulent, existentialist understanding of the self. And a painting serves as metaphor for reflection: He was not looking at the painting but through the painting looking at himself. He was looking through his wasted life . . . the past or the future that he thinks he is going to grab but could yet not see the future that he wants to grab. Who am I he asks, what am I? Am I an object . . . an object that has no price, an object that is wasted? . . . Who made sure to make me just an object? Did I do that to myself or did society do that to me? Or did the education that I pursued make me this object? What is the objective of education? What is the goal? The purpose of education was to make a person find out about himself.66 Este teteyeku

Este teteyeku (Let you be asked) is a collection of poems by one of Ethiopia’s powerful and militant intellectual poets, Yohannes Admassu (brother of literary scholar Yonas Admassu). For the purpose of this study, I will only focus on one of Johannes’s widely acclaimed poems, from which the collection

takes its name. The poem portrays the images of the modern collective with radical moral interrogation, whereby the author hopes for collectivism that empowers and affirms the self’s transformative power over society. The poem functions on various levels, simultaneously didactic, political, and historical. The author as both artist and ideologue questions social memory in the context of cultural crisis. The poem begins with these lines: Much as I sought fervently An answer to my heart’s query Consternation was all I got, confusion and worry; Oh, this hilarity of mine in these deceitful days, When I thought I was so erudite, In soothe was it all but harrowing tears. My thoughts, though high up in the skies, My knowledge, though of the first water, What once I hoped I could apprehend through my erudition, That knowledge I thought I had Was all in vain, futile as it was bland Yohannes Admassu, “Este teteyeku” (Translation by Yonas Admassu)67 Yohannes Admassu addressed the central questions of progress, its political divide, and the emancipation of individuals and society from exploitation and political oppression. A humanist and provocative poet, he is believed to have inaugurated Marxist social theory in the political thought of the modern intellectual. The author’s conscious radicalism, which was critical and self-critical of social and historical thought, provided an insurgent inquiry. Hence, in the 1960s, around the time of this poem, Marxism promised understanding and resolution for a restless intellectual who craved an idealistic political structure that would wipe out Ethiopia’s social ills. Yohannes Admassu never joined the Ethiopian Student Movement, which was later responsible for bringing about Marxism-Leninism as a dominant ideology in state and civil society. Nevertheless, his poem “Este teteyeku” epitomized the radicalized political and social thought of the era. A sample of his writing on freedom follows:

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What significance attaches to This thing you call freedom? Is it to while away your days? With no word spoken, in utter silence? Or, does it have another drift, Whether by free choice or edict? What fate is this freedom awaiting? Whether in common speech or embellished writing, As free will is suspended, Ere the law is scripted? Where principles are suppressed While the tongue is muzzled? Is it slush, all hear-nothing and a sigh? As it might well be turning a blind eye? By what name goes this doctrine so quelled, In that adobe of yours, That bounteous Land of the Dead? Yohannes Admassu, “Este teteyeku” (Translation by Yonas Admassu)68 Unlike Dagnachew Worku’s Adefres, which fanned apocalyptic fears about tradition and later about the shortcomings of Euro-American modernity, and Bealu Girma’s KeAdmas bashager, which gave a reductionist reading of liberalist individuality and later the individual’s troubled existence for anachronistically positing Western ideals of individuality, Yohannes Admassu’s “Este teteyeku” clearly understood and critically assessed the Ethiopian objective reality. Quite simply, the poem called for fundamental social rights. But Yohannes talked about the new collective subject rather than the individual, a collective agency that centered on a powerful narrative of the modern nation’s shortcomings. What kind of nation was that? And what kind of consciousness existed within that nation? A critic as well as an interrogator, Yohannes Admassu deliberated on these questions and urged the modern social imaginary to question citizenship, not in the abstract but in tangible and concrete terms that framed it within the nation’s history of consciousness. An erudite Orthodox Church scholar, Yohannes recognized the values of tradition in the construction of modern subjectivity. His book

on Yoftahe Negussie,69 which was published posthumously and edited by his brother Yonas Admassu, most emphatically declared his literary savvy, which derived its sophistication from the church’s “Wax and Gold” poesy. And undoubtedly, he made the modern social imaginary active and contemplative. In this respect, Yohannes Admassu provided an alternative reading to the disillusioned and partial critique of writers of his era. I bring Yohannes, who was unlike other writers of the period. into the dialogue not only to present his singularity but also to establish how his subversive character was apprehended and voiced in the political context of the period. Despite the negative reviews in Addis Reporter, the novels of Dagnachew Worku and Bealu Girma and the poems of Yohannes Admassu—perhaps because the storytelling was simple but mesmerizing—were widely consumed by people who read and wrote Amharic. Moreover, where silence ruled in the 1960s, the stories served as primary forms of antiregime dissent and as powerful critiques of the imperial state. These novels and poems, which still resonate in the Ethiopian psyche and are deeply ingrained, are also commonly read by the current generation of Ethiopians. Adefres, KeAdmas bashager, and “Este teteyeku” evoked images of an Ethiopian life that was dramatically changing, but the change was ominous and disturbing. The popular support for the two novels can be gauged by the fact that the books were reprinted in second editions. Censorship was also stringent during the imperial regime, and all forms of publications as well as movies and theater productions were scrutinized. A censorship board composed of seven journalists, one of whom was my own father, followed a strict set of rules. Any type of derogatory remark about the emperor or his policies was expressed forbidden. Therefore, the very essence of the novels and the poems resisted association with aggressive dissent, particularly since they were written in Amharic. It was easier to circumvent the censor with publications that were written in English, for most members of the censorship board were not literate in English. Certainly, therefore, writers in the Amharic publications of the period did not enjoy the relative autonomy of those penning articles in Addis Reporter. Novels such as Adefres were forced to use a broad rhetorical spectrum of satire and comedy in order to escape the rigorous censorship rules. And there were many such novels and poems in the 1960s, including Abe Gubegna’s Alweledm (I will not be born) and And lenatu (One for his

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mother), Berhanu Zerihun’s Yetewdros enba (The tears of Tewodros), and the famous poem “Berekete mergem” (The curse of bounty) by Hailu Gebre Yohannes. In this chapter, I have discussed three of the most important literary works of the sixties, in addition to the forum of ideas that shaped the period. That done, how is it possible to interrogate the discursive, political, and epistemological power of Ethiopian modern art through the modalities of the intellectual thought and literature I analyzed? The search for the self by Abera and Hailemariam in KeAdmas bashager, the vicissitudes of poverty and ignorance in Dagnachew Worku’s Adefres, the need for mutiny (amets) in Yohannes Admassu’s “Este teteyeku,” and the general questions of justice and citizenship raised by students and other intellectuals of the period were also felt by visual artists Gebre Kristos Desta and Skunder Boghossian as well as their students, as I discuss in chapter 3. One cannot explain the state of modernism in Ethiopia by simply drawing attention to its novelty. The examination of modern Ethiopian art requires interpretive methods that interrogate the implications of European modernism, even as they cover the assumptions and heuristics that shape the experiences of the Ethiopian modern subject. A critical discussion of the history of intellectual thought in the 1960s, as expressed in this chapter, allows us to bring to the fore the tensions and contradictions that constructed modernist intellectuals and artists during this era. I would, therefore, like to conclude by emphasizing that it is imperative to approach the artistic modernism of the 1960s that I cover in the next chapter from a proper perspective in view of its intellectual origin and evolution, since this particular period shaped the subsequent articulation of Ethiopian modernism. In this regard, it is crucial to shift the framework of discussion from the merely formal analysis of techniques to the specific social configurations and historical conjunctures within which the modernism of the 1960s emerged. I would also like to locate the decade’s artistic modernism in relation to its specific social matrix, where colonial consciousness, strictly speaking, existed. In addition, I would note that, to date, artistic modernism has rarely probed the ethical and political stances of colonialism that are naturally embedded in the histories of non-Western modernism. Certainly, we need to query if the unequal relations between the colonial centers and their peripheries were overcome in the last century because of Ethiopia’s obfuscated colonial history. Did Ethiopia ever secure

an autonomous economic and political domain outside the political interest of the West in its modern history? Briefly put, the history of modern Ethiopia shows a striking dependence on Western economic aid, whereby payments were routinely attached to certain political provisions. Ethiopia’s economic and political conditions of the last century are, therefore, of most pressing concern if we are to understand the origins and evolution of the country’s singularity and its history of modernism.

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Chapter 3

The Modernists of the 1960s Gebre Kristos Desta and Skunder Boghossian and Their Students

As we have seen, the broader political developments of the 1960s were reflected in productive and engaging visions of African nationalism and liberation. Ethiopia’s most prolific artists, writers, and militant students came of age during this exhilarating time in African history. But what did the political, intellectual, social, and cultural conditions of the 1960s mean to visual modernism? In other words, what was behind the creative visions of Ethiopian artists during this significant period? Perhaps the most curious disparity between literature, poetry, and theater, on the one hand, and the visual arts, on the other, is the notion of audience. As I have indicated elsewhere, the substantial majority of Ethiopians did not read or write English or Amharic, although readership in Amharic was markedly more widespread than English readership; literacy in English also served as a pivotal indicator of social status. The reading public was small in number, and it did not have a uniform social identity. But it is crucial to understand that for this group, reading, whether in English or Amharic, was considered an act of national conscience. This meant that the literary voices of dissent were forged in the heat of the political

conditions of the period. Furthermore, the social identities that distinguished the English literati from their Amharic peers were often blurred, since there was broad agreement on the basic concepts of the freedom and justice they all sought. For those who did not comprehend the dense deliberations of Addis Reporter, for instance, a similar venture of thought was available through Amharic works such as Adefres and KeAdmas bashager, among many others. Therefore, the definition of the reading public should be applied exclusively to an emerging literate elite that was savvy about the new types of literature—Amharic and English—that were being produced. Things were more complicated when it came to the negotiation of the visual arts. First, most intellectuals were strongly invested in texts and stage performances rather than visual arts. Second, though there was some debate among intellectuals regarding the purpose of the art that was being created, the inquiry fell far short of exploring the larger matrix of aesthetics and its relationship to the ideas behind Ethiopian art. Beyond that, the scrutiny given to works such as Gebre Kristos Desta’s paintings was neither as large nor as variegated as that given to other cultural imaginations, such as the literatures of the period. In fact, those works often did not receive any serious attention from other intellectuals. Consequently, any effort to engage and consider the visual arts within intellectual dialogue was generally sidelined. I would, therefore, emphasize that the reception given to the fundamentally fresh visual language of the 1960s was, for the most part, insubstantial, whereas literature, poetry, and theater were significantly popular. Even the militant students who fought for participatory democracy did not envision the visual arts as tools of resistance. Student publications such as Challenge and Struggle rarely engaged the period’s visual art, with the exception of a few articles such as the critique of Afework Tekle’s work written by Desalegn Rahmeto that I discuss in the next chapter. (Desalegn was one of the founders of the Ethiopian Student Movement.) Conversely, the visual artists of the period were intimately linked to the militant intellectual thought of student activists. Indeed, art exhibitions were held frequently at the Creative Arts Center, at the gallery of the Fine Art School, and at Belvedere Art Gallery, which was the first modern art gallery (established in 1965). Belvedere was originally opened by Ingrid Bolt von Vay, an Austrian housewife who was married to an American military adviser stationed in Ethiopia. She later partnered with Hrant Baghdassarian, an Armenian who lived in Ethiopia.

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Judging by the critiques and deliberations appearing in three of the most prominent publications from the period—Mennen, Addis Reporter, and the Ethiopian Observer—art exhibitions were attended by foreign and local dignitaries as well as students of Haile Selassie I University and the Fine Art School. And by implication, they were also attended by the writers and performers of the day who were friends with the visual artists, since it was they who critiqued the exhibitions. But for the broader intellectual base, the appeal of the visual arts was negligible. Certainly, Addis Reporter actively covered artistic practices, and it often attempted to direct the public’s attention to works of art. For instance, in its section called “A View from Arat Kilo,” it occasionally announced the art exhibitions of the week and urged readers to attend them. And the paper frequently complained about the meager attendance that art exhibitions drew. By contrast, as Addis Reporter regularly described, a warm reception was given to stage productions and poetry recitals. It seems apparent, then, that those who read the literatures of the period and attended the poetry recitals and stage productions chose to identify the issues preoccupying the 1960s through letters and stage performances and rarely considered the visual arts. Still, the visual modernism of the 1960s can only be examined within the wider world of intellectual thought, precisely because the contexts that shaped the categories of intellectual thought also found expression in visual art. And the radical shift in the visual modernism of the 1960s largely emanated from the works of Gebre Kristos Desta and Skunder Boghossian. In the pages ahead, I relate the contents of the novels, poems, and other intellectual production, including the radical Marxist-Leninist thought of the period that I discuss in chapter 2 to the visual articulations of Gebre Kristos Desta as well as students of the Fine Art School such as Zerihun Yetimgeta. In the process I examine the trends in art, writing, criticism, and philosophy that shaped the artistic experiences of the 1960s until the revolution of 1974. I theorize the images of Skunder Boghossian differently from those of Gebre Kristos Desta by periodizing and framing his work against the cultural politics from which his intellect and art developed. This required a different style of writing. Conceived in the broader sense, I believe Skunder has pioneered in areas of thought on how African visual studies should be based and reviewed. It is impossible to deny the significance of Gebre Kristos’s visual contribution, but I argue that the ideological demarcation of Skunder’s vigorous imagery is especially powerful insofar as it deals with

two different but equally significant topics: the transformative power of visual culture and the ontological foundation of colonial subjugation. Radically different from Gebre Kristos Desta’s art, both in its philosophical stance and in its formalist approach, Skunder’s work introduced a modern visual language that fundamentally redefined the paradigm of modernism through multiple frames—by challenging tradition, reconfiguring, and incorporating its values and, most importantly, by combining it with the African colonial legacy. In this, his markedly innovative and original art, unlike that of most intellectuals and artists from the period, radically redefined colonial consciousness. In this regard, I place special emphasis on his work. My account of Skunder Boghossian is also based on a series of interviews and interactions I had with the artist from 1996 to 2001. I also explore the creation and formation of intellectual culture in images of women and its relation to women’s art, focusing on the works of Desta Hagos, one of the few female artists from the 1960s. Gebre Kristos Desta: The Painter-Poet

A journey that never ends Miming and converting Swimming in colors Playing with lines And clashing with shadow and light Yearning to know Deep into space Searching— Gebre Kristos Desta, excerpt from “To Painting” (Translation mine)1 What can be said with certainty is that Gebre Kristos Desta was a powerful poet in addition to a painter—a man who, both in words and images, referenced the Ethiopian intellectual’s charged context of change and innovation in the 1960s. Like Yohannes Admassu’s “Este teteyeku,” Gebre Kristos’s poems were written in seductive yet provocative and subversive language. Although he questioned different modes of Ethiopian cultural agency, his works nonetheless drew from a wide range of history and philosophy. Works

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such as Golgotha (Figure 3.1) addressed his experiences and his history. A painting of the crucifix depicted in bloody red, Golgotha portrays the suffering connected to the cross of Christ and is one of the most stunning pieces of Ethiopian modern art. In the Ethiopian Orthodox iconography, one never sees Christ in despair and despondency, but in Golgotha, there is no courage or hope but only agony, as if the death of Christ imitates ordinary human death. Golgotha is not devotional like other crucifixes of the Orthodox Church, and moreover, it eclipses all illusions of hope, which is precisely contradictory to the message of the Orthodox cross. With his great intervention in Ethiopian literary and visual modernism, Gebre Kristos played a prominent role in the critical consciousness of this history. A thorough analysis of his work is essential to understand how he positioned the social, cultural, and moral scopes of Ethiopian life within the matrix of modern art and how he defined the meaning of their location in nationalist and transnationalist discourse. Like many of his friends—the writers, playwrights, and student activists of the 1960s—Gebre Kristos believed in a new ideal of state and nation. Whereas some artists, such as Skunder Boghossian, expressed the significance of colonial discourse in deliberations of freedom and injustice, others, including Gebre Kristos Desta, Dagnachew Worku, and Bealu Girma, simply conveyed the urgency of change and innovation, stopping short of examining the crisis and discontents of colonialism. Their disenchantment initially insisted on troubling their own histories, but they were later disillusioned by the complex social and material conditions of their histories that capitalist modernity had also largely shaped. Humanists such as Yohannes Admassu lamented multiple displacements, including the exclusion from full citizenship and the dehumanization of violent governance. Ultimately, however, they all, friends and comrades alike, not only interrogated but also sought to destroy the official narrative of the regime. Born in 1932 in the eastern province of Harar, Gebre Kristos Desta began as a self-taught artist, then studied painting and graphics at the Academy of Art in Cologne, Germany, from 1957 to 1961. His father, Aleka Desta, was a clergyman and a religious painter who worked on manuscript illuminations and other Orthodox Christian themes. Discussing his childhood and his father’s early influence on his art, Gebre Kristos remarked: “My father used to write the Holy Book, copying the gospel for the church. There were printing presses but the tradition was to have the books written by hand. He made his Figure 3.1 (opposite) Gebre Kristos Desta. Golgotha. 1963. 183 × 122 cm. Oil on

hardboard. Courtesy of the Modern Art Museum’s Gebre Kristos Desta Center.

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own parchment and ink and wrote with quills. He also decorated the books with vignettes of the Mother and Child figure and angels. So, I was watching that. He really encouraged me, I was always painting.”2 Gebre Kristos completed his elementary education in Harar and finished high school at the General Wingate School in Addis Ababa. He enrolled in Haile Selassie I University to study agricultural science but later abandoned his studies to become an artist. In his early twenties, he developed a condition that altered his skin pigmentation, for which he unsuccessfully sought a cure at home and abroad. Many of his friends, including the actor Tesfaye Gessese and the playwright Abate Mekuria, said that the stigma attached to his skin disease deeply affected him. His student Desta Hagos said she thought “he had leprosy and was scared” when she first met him, adding that he had told her it was “not contagious” and that it was “dead.”3 Gebre Kristos’s Self Portrait is a curious depiction within a culture that shunned his body (Figure 3.2). Greatly influenced by German Expressionist styles, he used his own image to probe the complexities of the human soul. Perhaps one of the greatest masterpieces of Ethiopian modern art, his self-portrait was an Expressionist study of himself. Bold, harsh, and angular lines seize a most graphic image. The face is rendered in two separate and distinct elements. The left side is painted with a poignant blue tone. and the right is highlighted in a tortuous shade of white. In a suggestive move that seems to recount his emotional imprisonment, the right eye is painted closed, thus altering the humanity of a face whose identity appears to have closed down. The eye on the left looks directly at the viewer as if pleading to be understood. With the body clad in a disheveled shirt that is awkwardly hanging around the neck, the image evokes agony and susceptibility. In a poem about his skin condition, Gebre Kristos once wrote, “I could have been someone else; it is only myself that I am unable to be.” 4 Put simply, the passionate intensity of his Self Portrait powerfully illustrates his personal life in a society that failed to empathize with his rare condition. Through somber, vibrant, and gushing colors that are at once exhilarating and agonizing, Self Portrait narrates deep wounds that are tendentiously perceptive. Earlier in his career, Gebre Kristos immersed himself in works that recognized the ills of Ethiopian society, and he worked on themes such as Figure 3.2 (opposite) Gebre Kristos Desta. Self Portrait. 1967. 70 × 50 cm. Oil on

hardboard. Courtesy of Noah Semere.

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begging and prostitution. It was in Germany that he made a methodological shift and became attached to German Expressionist works. Just like the German Expressionists, he used bold lines, vivid colors, distorted images, incisive self-portraits, chaotic urban scenes, and joyous landscapes. He returned to Ethiopia in 1962 and began to teach at the Fine Art School, and he held his first solo exhibition a year later at the same school. His student Achamyeleh Debela recalled, “It was at this juncture that Gebre Kristos began to face the challenges faced by many contemporary African artists of his caliber. His art was met with criticism. His critics were quick to point their fingers to say that he had come back with a foreign art form and that he had passed up traditional art opting for modern and alien forms.”5 At a time when abstract art was foreign to many Ethiopians, Gebre Kristos insisted that abstract art mirrored a much-desired modern awareness. Just like Dagnachew Worku’s Adefres and Bealu Girma’s Abera and Hailemariam, Gebre Kristos initially believed in the promises of Euro-American modernity, and just like these characters, he portrayed ambivalence, moral doubt, and anxiety about vernacular culture. But despite the implied indifference to traditional cultures that was apparent in many of his public statements, I believe Gebre Kristos was never truly free from tradition; rather, I suggest, tradition constituted the background against which his works could be examined. Certainly, his lush and intense colors, jagged and distorted lines, and rapid brushwork were evidence of an influential epoch of artistic and literary mutiny, which gave rise to an unprecedented moment of experimentation. But even as Gebre Kristos cried out against apathy, his images always transformed themselves, reconstructing and deconstructing the relations that gave rise to their own materiality. Works such as Green Abstract (Figure 3.3) centered on a shining circle, a dominant symbol in many of his early paintings and an emblem that Achamyeleh Debela said “was the core of vibrating energy.”6 Every line and texture revolved around radiant circles that overlapped and interlocked, of which Gebre Kristos commented, “The circle is infinite, unending. It symbolizes the hemisphere and heavenly bodies. It is in line with the search for a solution in life, when it frequently happens that one may believe he has reached the optimum solution, only to find (since art is life itself) that the search must continue, a perfect solution forever remains elusive.”7 In various unpublished works,8 Gebre Kristos acknowledged, albeit hesitantly, customary referents to his works. For instance, he made an analogy of the circle to the tella (Ethiopian beer) tin can that sits outside the house of a

Figure 3.3 Gebre Kristos Desta. Green Abstract. 1966. 80 × 120 cm. Oil on canvas.

Courtesy of the Modern Art Museum’s Gebre Kristos Desta Center.

woman who sells the brew. The can serves as a sign of the brew’s availability in that particular house. He said the can had the effect of a trumpet, a musical sound, caves and eternal craters, or even the symbolism of a mother’s womb. The emptiness, he thought, might also mean discarded objects and the hollowness of life. Gebre Kristos’s works were often subsequently embedded in an Ethiopian cultural context, but in several of the accounts that I examine below, the artist paradoxically wanted to transcend that context in his public statements, as if he feared revealing that dependency to the public. After returning from Germany, Gebre Kristos engrossed himself in a series of abstract compositions that represented his understanding of the modern world. Works such as Green Abstract were generative of new modes of making and looking at art. Abstract art was newly available for consumption, and the broader public could not understand this form of art because it was distinctly different from the visual expressions the public was used to, which were church art and its manifestation in modern executions. Much as Adefres’s modern consciousness was refused by the locals of Debre Sina who failed to conceptually understand it, Gebre Kristos’s

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disciplinary matrixes of modern art that were intended to project a new and progressive consciousness were met with rejection. Indeed, just like the people of Debre Sina who had to know the relationship of Adefres’s ideas of progress to their own tradition, the source of Gebre Kristos’s newfound knowledge needed an origin and genetic content in order to be valued. But this ideological construct invariably presupposed traditional values and archetypes. Even for some of the younger students, his works seemed strange. Taye Wolde Medhin confessed that as a student, he was not interested in much of Gebre Kristos’ paintings and said that at the time students were not exposed to abstract paintings.”9 Wossene Kosrof stated that “students even thought that abstract painters could not draw.”10 In 1963, Gebre Kristos remarked: It is funny that people who know nothing about the history of art attach such exaggerated importance to the art of their own country. They don’t realize how international art really is. Picasso would hardly have created his “Cubism” had he not seen African Art. Matisse was influenced by Islamic traditions. Gauguin went as far as Tahiti to find new inspirations. We create ultra-modern houses in our developing countries. We build super highways on which we drive the latest model cars from all over the world. We use all sorts of up to date international styles in technology, science, education, medicine and what have you. Why in the world should art be different?11 But what appeared so familiarly “modern” to Gebre Kristos also had its own historicity. For instance, consider the avant-gardism of Pablo Picasso and company that Gebre Kristos indicated was intended to critique civilization by embracing an imagined primitiveness of Africans whose “authenticity” they placed in opposition to a “decadent” West. African artists such as Skunder Boghossian nevertheless changed Picasso’s avant-gardism into a politicized philosophy that challenged European cultural primacy. African modernism consequently owes its scholarship to the various deconstructive arguments against European modernism. Like so many intellectuals of the period, Gebre Kristos failed to address the colonial/decolonial sensibility when he talked about the cross-cultural influences of modern art. On one account, Gebre Kristos frequently disregarded what Fanon had called the “third person consciousness,”12 by which the black man was

forced to objectify himself in the way that the white man had objectified him in order to understand his identity. Often, Gebre Kristos did not conceptualize an identity outside the colonial framework. He insisted that one had to understand the European modern if one were ever going to comprehend modern art. Yet in somewhat paradoxical relation to his public statements, his works drew from a wide range of Ethiopian culture, history, and philosophy. In his acceptance speech for the Haile Selassie I Foundation award in 1965, Gebre Kristos remarked: Modern art reflects the artists’ view of the world, its intricacies, its beauty and its creativity. Art can no longer be comprehended in a confined way like it had been for centuries. Today, the modern world understands art as a basis of knowledge to investigate many things. This has seemingly made modern art as knowledge that looks chaotic and confused on the canvas. This seeming confusion nevertheless consists of its own rules and regulations. The larger public will find it difficult to appreciate modern art until these rules and regulations are fully deciphered.13 Gebre Kristos clearly foresaw the role of art in shaping national consciousness, but he ultimately failed to explore questions about whether the colonized should emulate the West or seek a whole new set of values and ideas that were grounded in an Ethiopian thought system. And in the absence of a dialogue that addressed these queries, quite an equivocal range of political and cultural overtones would be incorporated in the new historical period the intellectuals anticipated; though they wanted to erase the many continuities of the past, they could not avoid borrowing some of its core ideas. This was particularly obvious in the novels Adefres and KeAdmas bashager. Toward the end of the first work, Adefres understood that embracing the sensibilities of the past or of tradition was more potent than just importing a European space of knowledge. Abera expressed a similar apprehension near the end of KeAdmas bashager. But the most important things that students, artists, and writers failed to challenge effectively were the prejudices of the European modern—its social institutions and practices that refused to admit into its history the range of cultural practices that emanated from the non-West. The question of how the so-called modern could happen again in the non-West if it already had its authentic embodiment in Europe was also seldom examined critically.

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Attempting to reconcile the dichotomy between Gebre Kristos and those who did not understand his art form, Solomon Deressa wrote, “A portrait of a German girl by a good Ethiopian painter is necessarily more Ethiopian, than either a portrait of an Ethiopian face by a foreigner [or] a schmaltzy portrait of an Ethiopian peasant by a slick Ethiopian painter. The schmaltz is neither Ethiopian nor un-Ethiopian, but quite simply bad. In short, it is difficult to realize how a good work by a sincere Ethiopian artist can be anything but Ethiopian.”14 The portrait of the German girl that Solomon referred to is Remembering Marga (Figure 3.4). In this painting, the girl’s irresistible eyes—delicate, dark, and poignant—gaze out of the surface. Her hair is murky, with traces of red highlights that give her angular face a glow of amber tone. A rinse of random dark brushstrokes obscures her face as if to show her blues. Yet the face that seems completely vulnerable becomes simultaneously serene with the movement of light, so tenderly placed on her face, at once both tranquil and troublesome. Along with Self Portrait, Remembering Marga is one of Gebre Kristos’s rare and exquisite portraits. The intellectuals who wrote about his works, including Solomon Deressa, appealed to the critics who found fault with his works to appreciate the new and highly imaginative forms incorporated in Gebre Kristos’s art. Ironically, Solomon, who wrote about the imposition of Western culture in articles such as “The Hyphenated Ethiopian,” reduced the hegemonic authority of Western aesthetics when defending the artist. Gebre Kristos’s art was met with harsh criticism by a few journalists, and newspaper articles accused him of abandoning traditional Ethiopian themes after returning from Germany, attacking his immersion by way of a foreign art form that was difficult to understand. What was ironic here was the criticism leveled by numerous people regarding Gebre Kristos’s absorption with European art forms. Largely unconcerned with the complex relationship between European art forms that they said Gebre Kristos unquestioningly accepted, on one hand, and an exclusively Ethiopian art form with modern intonations that they wanted crafted, on the other—that is, unconcerned with the power relations between the dominant and the repressed forms—their disapproval simply reflected their own inability to understand the artist’s work. This group of critics, composed of journalists Figure 3.4 (opposite) Gebre Kristos Desta. Remembering Marga. 1965. 65.5 × 50 cm.

Oil on cardboard. Courtesy of the Modern Art Museum’s Gebre Kristos Desta Center.

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and a few people from the educated elite,15 nonetheless celebrated the novels, dramas, and poems of the period, which also marked Gebre Kristos’s opacities. This was an interesting paradox, in which the visual art was not seen as a product of historical sources and the indigeneity of the visual art form mattered most. For this group of critics, art was only for decorative purposes; ideally, in their opinion, it would be created in a realist mode, with the elements of traditional culture evident. This kind of perception, where history is restricted to textual disciplines and art is deemed outside the boundaries of defined disciplines of knowledge production, is also part of the general trend in contemporary intellectual thought. Unfortunately, the artist’s response to the intense political climate of the 1960s, which was inseparable from the response of the writer, the student, and the poet, did not evolve into contemporary intellectual thought. Gebre Kristos could no longer ignore the criticism when, in 1968, he was accused of betraying his roots. He replied to this accusation: The Ethiopian Church Art, which is regarded as an important part of our cultural heritage and which I am accused of discarding in favor of foreign styles—this supposedly indigenous art actually is Byzantine in style. It too incorporates “foreign” elements and arrives, perhaps, at a characteristically Ethiopian synthesis. Now the same thing will happen in the present age. Fifty years from now, we may see a new Ethiopian tradition evolving, one which draws on what the rest of the world has to offer, but which is more than the sum of its parts. Don’t misunderstand me. I do not for a moment, deny the importance of preserving traditional arts, and we have artists here who are doing just that. But, not everybody need be in the preservation business. There are pioneers in art just as there are in other fields. I am interested in moving on, in showing our society that an Ethiopian can achieve something in the most modern way.16 But just how the Ethiopian could “achieve something in the modern way” is another critical query that Gebre Kristos and the rest of the intellectual circle failed to investigate. How the asymmetrically experienced phenomenon of modernism manifested itself in the non-West was a question that befuddled intellectuals such as Solomon Deressa, Dagnachew Worku, and Bealu Girma and artists such as Gebre Kristos Desta.

As Gebre Kristos tried to locate modernism through a philosophy of deconstruction, he engaged politically with the complex challenges of citizenship, as did most of his colleagues—the students and writers. This is not to say that Gebre Kristos or his friends offered alternative visions for social change, although both writers and artists looked forward to the realization of the student intellectuals’ radical struggle to overthrow the monarchy. Artists and writers simply sought a moral and ethical position to transcend what they considered retrograde and worn out, whereas students pursued a violent Marxist-Leninist struggle against the state. It was the terms and conditions of change—the multiple complexities and characteristics of historical encounters and relations with colonial and capitalist modernity—that Gebre Kristos and the rest of the intellectual circle found problematic to confront. For Gebre Kristos Desta, poetry was as dear as painting. An incredible poet, he wrote in a concentrated and elliptical language. We do not know whether he read Expressionist poets such as Georg Heym and Ernst Stadler, but his language was condensed just as theirs was, utilizing strings of nouns and eliminating narrative and description to get to the essence of feeling. For example, he wrote: What if one creates Jewels Beauty, Builds a home Owns property, Sends Flowers, Sends letters Why not Gebre Kristos Desta, excerpt from “Fikir tila sitel” (When love casts a shadow) (Translation by Heran Sereke Berhan)17 Like his paintings, his poems were unfamiliar to the Ethiopian sensibility and considered controversial. His critics questioned whether they were really poems at all. In a letter to African Arts, critic Solomon Deressa wrote, “Gebre Kristos Desta, a painter who perhaps is overly cerebral on canvas, is so far the only Ethiopian poet who unwittingly or not, has unleashed raging controversy in the local papers as to whether his poems are

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poems at all. It is difficult to believe that the journalists fail to see the sparse beauty of his rhythm in several dimensions.”18 Gebre Kristos’s provocative and much-debated art forms came to an end after the revolution of 1974, when the socialist military junta took over and brought mayhem and cruelty to the nation. In sharp contrast to his earlier works, his later art, especially paintings made after the Red Terror, evoked socially critical tableaux. He narrated the powerful themes of repression and misery that pervaded his country. It was during this period that Gebre Kristos worked on paintings such as In the Third World (Figure 3.5) and In the Grotto (Figure 3.6). These canvases depicted the painter in the act of witnessing, remembering, and expressing the ravages of war, famine, and genocide—the traumas that he himself experienced. In the Third World and In the Grotto both contain figures that show no form of identity, suggesting the period in which Gebre Kristos lived. Mummified and petrifying figures are painted in dark colors and wrap the surface of In the Third World. The most visible image is that of a mummified woman sitting on what appears to be a rock, her face looking like that of a decayed corpse. She seems to be wailing, perhaps crying for a child lost to war, and her face is disfigured with her mouth wide open and her eyes like hollow sockets. What is so clear in the image is the burden in those hollowed eyes. Simultaneously imagined and visible, the eyes appear to be begging for mercy and for a redemption that seems far away. Her entire body is draped in white cloth, like the cloth used to wrap a dead body. The intensity of the water color is arresting, the strokes enough to bear her fierce despondency. Emerging concurrently as dead and living, the figures in both works are imprisoned while at the same time seeking release from their captivity. Through these paintings, Gebre Kristos conveyed the intricate dialectics of trauma and the aftermaths of genocide. Given the context of such works, I would argue two points. First, even the cruelties of genocide did not focus attention on the political complexity of decolonization and its practical effects. And second, artistic identity continued to bear the traces of Ethiopia’s historical singularity. In other words—and perhaps this is the larger claim—I would contend that artists such as Gebre Kristos Desta believed in their exceptionality even as they fell prey to new forms of coloniality. Indeed, the anomaly of Ethiopia’s Figure 3.5 (opposite) Gebre Kristos Desta. In the Third World. 1979. 80 × 60.5

cm. Aquarelle. Courtesy of the Modern Art Museum’s Gebre Kristos Desta Center.

Figure 3.6 Gebre Kristos Desta. In the Grotto. 1979. 100 × 150 cm. Acrylic on

carbon. Courtesy of the Modern Art Museum’s Gebre Kristos Desta Center.

colonial history resulted in a complex combination of resistance in pursuit of human rights by artists and intellectuals, together with a disregard for the transnational dimensions of colonialism and its significant link to Ethiopia’s distinct colonial history. This unresolved quandary continues to mark present-day artistic thought and practice, in which broader affiliations across African national borders are sidelined. Modernist Spirit: Figurations of Skunder Boghossian

I am aware that I am a witness to my time, other times. I am just time itself. —Skunder Boghossian19 Much has been written about Skunder Boghossian, but aside from the writings of his friend and colleague Solomon Deressa, any critical definition upon which to conceptualize his work has been limited, relying upon popular perceptions and recurring anecdotes. Often, his works are described as dreamlike. His influences are traced to the Bauhaus Expressionist Paul Klee and to the Afro-Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam. His love for music is attributed

to jazz, and his elaborate work is basically boxed up within African “motifs” and “symbols.” However, Skunder’s art has left a quintessential mark on Ethiopian modernism. His vigorous imagery presents an absorbing and critical account of the political culture of the colonial and postcolonial eras, defining modern Ethiopian art against canonical interpretations. “I like porous surfaces,” Skunder said to African American jazz scholar Thomas Porter in 1980, “especially things that remain in sands, textures left by sneakers, tractors, a tank, things which witness their time.”20 And as Susan Buck-Morss commented, “The time of the modern meant for him developing images” that were transnational and critical yet classical, insistent, and defiant.21 Solomon Deressa noted that Skunder traveled to the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela,22 to the imperial cities of Gondar and Axum,23 to the monasteries in the north, to the walls of Harar,24 and to the sculptures of southern Ethiopia to experience “things which witness their time.” The “magical scrolls”—the amulets made by the debteras25—whose purpose was to ward off evil became Skunder’s channel of courage, and their invincibility attracted his creative buoyance. The debtera of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is a learned person who completes the same studies as a priest. However, unlike a priest, he can neither celebrate mass nor take confession. He usually takes on the role of a teacher and performs the music and dance associated with church services. What is important about the debtera for Skunder’s works is his knowledge as astrologer, scribe, and fortune-teller. He is very well versed on traditional healing plants, and in many instances, he can invoke Satan to do good or evil by reciting mysterious Christian texts. Debteras are particularly well known for their amulets, which contain scrolls of illuminated parchment inscribed with Christian and nonChristian texts. People who are afflicted with illness wear these amulets around their necks to be cured of their maladies and, in some cases, to protect themselves from bad spirits such as the zar26 and the bouda.27 In cases where the amulets are not needed, the patient looks fixedly at the scroll and enters a healing trance. By staring at the scroll, the sick person is presumably penetrated and cured through his or her eyes. Different amulets are crafted for different illnesses. What intrigued Skunder about these debtera scrolls were the juxtapositions of the supernatural with the natural and their corresponding yet conflicting relationships. Put simply, the scrolls completely and absolutely consumed him until the end of his life. As Solomon noted, they proved to

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Skunder that “surrealism is not a one-time European invention but an innate human urge, to delve into the unconscious with or without Freud and Jung. And he painted it all, not as a recapitulating explorer might, but as a native son enthralled by the poetic power of the vision of ancestors who can only be honored by being subsumed.”28 Indeed, Skunder Boghossian examined the formal and conceptual frameworks that outlined the intellectual, political, and artistic philosophies of what Valentin Mudimbe (1994) had called “the multi-faceted idea of Africa.”29 His visual contribution, which was insistent on hybridization, was also stylistic and conceptually complex, and it played a significant role in the critical recovery of pan-Africanism and Ethiopian nationalism. All of this makes Skunder Boghossian a vital figure in the discourse of Ethiopian modernism. Skunder was born in 1937 during Benito Mussolini’s occupation of Ethiopia to a father of Armenian descent and an Ethiopian mother. His father, Colonel Kosrof Gorgorios Boghossian, was an officer of the Imperial Bodyguard during the reign of Haile Selassie, and he was active in the resistance against the Italian occupation. Colonel Kosrof Boghossian was taken to Italy as a prisoner of war when Skunder was just one year old and did not return to Ethiopia until Skunder was eight, thereby missing the most formative and tender periods of the boy’s childhood. Skunder was a student at Tefferi Mekonnen School when he was introduced to Jacques Godbout, a FrenchCanadian writer and painter who was teaching French at the University College (currently Addis Ababa University) before joining the National Film Board of Canada as a producer and scriptwriter in 1958. Godbout gave Skunder lessons in painting; in his words, Godbout taught him to “let the painting paint itself.”30 According to Solomon, “Colonel Kosrof Boghossian would not have picked painting as the first career choice for his son and was not aware that Skunder was cutting classes to take painting lessons from Jacques Godbout. He wanted his son to do well in school and [be] on his way to a respectable future, if not in the military, at least in the civil service.”31 It was also then that Skunder met Larry Erskine, an African American neighbor who not only gave him feedback on his sketches and drawings but also introduced him to the Voice of America jazz program that used to be relayed to Addis Ababa from Tangier. From then on, music and particularly jazz molded and formed the colors, shapes, and yearnings of his canvases. “Jazz,” said Solomon, “[was] so fully assimilated into Skunder’s myths of birth, change and dissolution that to this day I cannot look at Skunder’s painting

without hearing Sonny Rollins or Coltrane or Miles Davis.”32 He danced to the music as he painted, and through the canvas, he heard the trumpet of Miles Davis, the keyboard of Thelonious Monk, and the saxophone of John Coltrane. And just like a jazz musician, he improvised while dancing to the beat, masterfully fusing and cajoling several art techniques. It is no surprise, then, that I learned from Skunder Boghossian the complexity and yet simplicity of sound, with jazz as its epitome. He rarely listened to standard jazz, preferring, for instance, Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew” to “Kind of Blue.”33 I remember the first time I met Skunder in 1996, when I presumptuously made an unsolicited visit to his studio space (which was also his home) in Washington, D.C. Music was blaring, and the sweet aroma of Ethiopian incense besieged the air. We listened to Ethiopian Orthodox chants (teslote etan) at first, followed by Coltrane and music from Mali. Strangely enough, the selections seemed to correspond as complementing melodies, an impression Skunder reinforced by attributing the connections of each number to every other one. For him, the cohesion between the jazz lyrics of the African American, the melodious chant of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and the rhythmic tune of the singer from Mali were all part of a natural reality. Each contained the other. He told me then that all his works were a “perpetual celebration of the varieties of blackness.”34 Godbout’s painting lessons had been the extent of Skunder’s art training when in 1955, at the age of seventeen, he won the second prize in abstract art at the National Art Exhibition, held for the Jubilee Anniversary Celebration of Emperor Haile Selassie. More senior artists, Afework Tekle and Gebre Kristos Desta, received the first and third prizes, respectively. Following his success at the exhibition, Skunder was awarded a scholarship to study abroad. He attended St. Martin’s School of Art and Central School in London, as well as the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts (1955–56) and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière (1957–63) in Paris. His education in jazz and his love for this style of music also took root in Paris, where the best of African American jazz musicians had flocked. He knew all of the famed musicians, including Bud Powell, Lester Young, and Sonny Rollins, as well as all of the visual and aural particulars of the Paris jazz world. Pretending to be an assistant, he later recalled, he carried Rollins’s saxophone so he could get a seat in the front during the muscian’s performances, and he even had a part in Louis Armstrong’s 1961 movie Paris Blues. His presence among these jazz giants informed his exquisite knowledge of music,

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particularly jazz. His experiences in Paris were consequently what crystallized in the conviction of his creative style. Paris brought a retreat inward and backward—backward to the histories and myths of people of color and inward to a new intrepid style. Solomon Deressa, who was also a student in Paris during the same time, described the experience: Consider the situation for a moment. In 1957, London and Paris were in the middle of the 20th century, and Ethiopia in the 14th. And a 19-year-old Ethiopian student, more sheltered than most Addis teenagers, gets off the train at the Gard du Nord with no money for room and board, and no papers. Nothing except his will to learn to paint. And the only way to stay in Paris legally was to register at one of the institutions of higher learning for the then almost non-existent tuition fees. Skunder registered at the Ecole Superieure des Beaux Arts.35 The Paris Years (1957–66)

I grew up in the streets of Paris, I had no problem being black or yellow or green. I learned my craft. —Skunder Boghossian36 African art historians such as Chika Okeke and Salah Hassan and curators such as Okwui Enwezor have written about African diaspora artists who lived in Paris in the forties, fifties, and sixties. It was these artists who appropriated the Parisian avant-garde’s modernist techniques and mediated their own coherent images. Okeke, Hassan, and Enwezor have also written about the links between African and European modernity that generated an articulation of African modernism. African diaspora artists of these decades sought conduits that veered away from European modernism while remaining connected with it. Exhibitions including The Short Century: Liberation and Independence Movements in Africa have presented an anthology of historical texts and images that referred to critical practices championed by African artists during the cololonial and immediate postindependence eras.37 One could say that African modernism developed its roots in diasporic artists of the liberation and independence movements and their politicized philosophy,

which became a vital discourse in challenging European cultural primacy. As Enwezor wrote, “Independence and liberation movements in Africa found critical and philosophical approaches in the fact that they announced themselves as political and social movements and as a philosophy of culture.”38 By appropriating and juxtaposing European art forms, African artists narrated the complexities of their societies and skillfully negotiated what W. E. B. Du Bois had called their “double consciousness”39 to assert that Africans were no longer relegated to looking at themselves through the eyes of others but could now see through their own gaze. African art historians such as Hassan have argued that these artists were neither mimetic nor derivative and that they were not trying to catch up to an avant-garde that was long gone; rather, as Susan Buck-Morss has said, they were considerably engaged in “opening up to a new universally accessible aesthetic.”40 Skunder was part of this group who lived in Paris at that critical time and who played a key role in redefining colonized subjectivity. He did not stay long at Ecole Superieure de Beaux Arts, where he had initially enrolled. In 1957, he joined the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, where he met two prominent figures—Curt Goetz, then maître d’atelier (the master of the studio) at the Grand Chaumière, from whom Skunder noted he learned many of his skills, and Andre Breton, the sage of the Surrealist movement who frequently visited the Chaumière to do his own work. For many years, Breton’s informal seminars convened on Saturdays in a café not far from St. Germain, and Solomon recalled that the seminars were free but by invitation only. Skunder habitually attended. The South African artist Gerard Skoto, whom Skunder had also befriended in Paris, introduced him to the great Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam in 1959 at the Second International Congress of Negro Writers in Rome. “There are indeed vantage points,” said Solomon, “from which the world appears black . . . and not half bad at that. Paris of the mid-sixties was it.”41 Looking back, Skunder once wrote that the works of artists in Paris during that time were so varied that they at times confused his own work.42 But the confusion later became a suggestion when Skunder mmersed himself in African mythology while still living in Paris. His images explored the context and use of African symbolism and iconography. The strong connection he developed with the spiritual powers of African ancestors, which drove his creative will for much of his life, began in Paris. He often credited

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Christian Lattier, the Ivorian sculptor (1925–78) who lived in the city around the same time and who created astonishing string and wire constructions, with having made a lasting impression on his illusory and wildly imaginative juxtapositions of memory, fantasy, and reality. He said that Lattier attached transcendental attributes to all of the artworks he produced and that Lattier’s belief in the actualities of powerful, concealed, and unobserved beings, although extraordinary, had become an enigma as he slowly developed a somber paranoia in the latter part of his life. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Skunder shared the same predicament. He had a complicated relationship with the spirits that at times were in harmony with him and at other times tortured him. This struggle reverberated in much of his work. One cannot talk about Skunder without talking about his alcoholic quandary, which haunted him for a major part of his life, particularly when he lived in the United States. He said he drank because he was in dissonance with the spirits. The spirits and their invisible power defined the auspices of time and place for him. The desires, possibilities, and deferred dreams became all too visible in his drinking days. The images that he created right after his agonizing drinking bouts, however, were fantastic visual languages of struggle between the demon and the seraph, between night and day, and between Armageddon and dawn. Considering that he was one of the avant-garde African artists who zealously expressed what it was to be African, Skunder was not given his due place in the history of art. The field of art history has long preserved separations between artists—between those who have sustenance from art history’s institutional structures and those whose works it considers not yet (or never) worthy of its provisions. Skunder Boghossian was packaged as an artist of the 1960s and 1970s who played with African motifs and also as an artist who no longer held relevance in the 1990s. This befuddled him for most of his life. He was categorized by Western critics, historians, and curators as a by-product of the anticolonial cultural movements—and that was a fundamental misunderstanding of an arbitrarily imposed perspective by those who did not comprehend his works, despite the fact that he continued to produce magnificent images until his death. As a consequence, he was rarely able to attract the interest of the major Western art platforms, particularly when it came to exhibiting works that were created after the 1990s. This situation contributed to the various upheavals in his life, which he expressed as discordances with the evil spirits. Unlike Lattier, Skunder

nonetheless believed in the redemptive appeal of the spirits and their will to absolve. He routinely talked about the spirit of the evil, but he equally contemplated the spirit of the good that resisted carnage. Skunder had trouble overcoming the association of his work with the liberation movements, but it is also true that his close acquaintance with pioneers of these movements, Aimé Césaire and Cheikh Anta Diop, left a lasting mark on his creative style. “At the cafes,” Solomon wrote, “we drank with and listened to the likes of the Senegalese polymath Cheikh Anta Diop, and African-American writers Chester Himes, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright. . . . Diop’s primary preoccupation at the time was the deep organic unity of African culture.”43 According to friend and art critic Kifle Biseat, who lived in Paris with Skunder in the early 1960s and was also closely acquainted with Diop and Césaire, “it was these two great personalities who deconstructed European historicism of African history and culture and who distinctly shaped Skunder’s creativity by inculcating in him the role that African people have played in history, and their impact on the development of early societies and institutions.”44 Diop’s book entitled The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (1974) affirmed ancient Egypt’s civilization as African in origin.45 According to Diop, the entire Mediterranean world was formerly Egypt, and Egypt had borrowed from other parts of Africa and particularly from Ethiopia. Kifle Biseat also recalled that Anta Diop’s tall and commanding physical presence resembled that of Mengistu Neway, the commander of the Imperial Bodyguard who attempted a coup against Emperor Haile Selassie’s government in 1960. Mengistu Neway allegedly said at the time, “Ethiopia shall never be the same again. Once we start the fire, it will burn on by itself.”46 Indeed, the failed coup, which the emperor stopped short by murdering its participants, radicalized intellectuals who later formed the Ethiopian Student Movement that I discussed in chapter 2. Kifle told me that Mengistu Neway’s courage had deeply impressed Skunder and that for Skunder, Diop was personified through the defiant image of Mengistu Neway. Diop’s optimism also gave Skunder’s generation a vision drawn from African art—of the astounding depth of the continent’s mystery and the enormity of its creative possibilities. Further, Diop’s combination of an unusual breadth of knowledge and a militant standpoint animated African diaspora artists of the time. The same can be said of Aimé Césaire, who in 1963 wrote the poem “Éthiopie à Alioune Diop,” published in Présence

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Africaine. In more than just a quest to critically engage the West’s fictive notion of Africanity, Césaire insisted on a new and credible African intellectual tradition that was aware of itself: its history, poetry, art, and philosophy. Césaire paid tribute to Ethopia’s history and civilization: And I saw this Byzantine tale scribbled by the rains on the strong shoulders of the mountain in the playful writing of eucalyptus trees So in truth in the name of baobab and palm from my Senegal heart and my Islands heart I greeted the eucalyptus with purity from the scrupulous depths of my plant-matter heart And the men were gods in wind-blown tunics with sticks before them descending their Olympus which is the Blue Nile and the women were queens queens of polished ebony leant by the honey of the night and etched with ivory Queen of Sheba Queen of Sheba what does the bird of Simmorg-Anka say? Aimé Césaire, excerpt from “Ethiopia . . . to Alioune Diop”47 For Skunder Boghossian, whose experiences of colonialism were much different from those of his African counterparts, the valorization of the African aesthetic and intellectual tradition intriguingly marked a fundamental step in the assertion of black identity. And as Kifle Biseat said, that came along with a feeling of responsibility as “the descendant of the greatest and proudest race who symbolized the value and dignity of African traditions.”48 Skunder’s acquaintance with Césaire and Diop particularly shaped his awareness of questions of race and colonial subjectivity, in which the project of black liberation hence became at once spiritual and political. As the African American art historian Richard Powell has said, Skunder Boghossian was part of a genre of African and African American artists in Paris who had access to a whole range of black expressive culture. He stated, “Skunder’s tight involvement in Paris with cultures like ‘Présence Africaine’

and Camus’ Black Orpheus significantly altered his work curiously making it both pan-African and universal . . . an artistic balancing act that he, along with his fellow universalists, had perfected, and one that Sartre believed would push them out of ‘past particularisms’ and into ‘future universalisms’ which in turn would ultimately enact ‘the twilight of their negritude.’”49 For Skunder, the consciousness of being an African in the diaspora was consequently an awareness of what it meant to be politically black, a notion that recognized the significance of African cultural production wherein the objects of expression were once alive even if they no longer are. It was during this historic development that Skunder Boghossian’s most important series of works, Nourishers, emerged. Prominent Works from the Paris Years The Nourisher Series (1963–64)

All twelve works of the Nourisher Series were completed in Paris. Nine of them are presently unaccounted for, and only two are available in photographic images. Poised between the living, the dead, and the unborn, Skunder became immersed in the infinite realities of the universe in this pastel, gouache, and ink series where the visible world was simply an isolated case in relation to the cosmos. Solomon called these images “the ingenious infusion of spirit into ostensibly prosaic objects.”50 The series reveals Skunder’s awareness of the materiality of the past, but he was also cautious of its recovery. In these works, the gouache gives an opaque and matte feeling, and the ink gives a striking simplicity. Skunder uses the ink in a loose and freeflowing style, by which the viewer can easily travel from the tangible world to its spiritual and supernatural counterpart. In this richly textured work, his visionary trepidation of a higher reality is dramatically revealed. From the tangible world to its spiritual and supernatural parallel, images are fragmented even as they are simultaneously connected (Figure 3.7). Perhaps one can read this art form in association with the free play that was characteristic of Surrealism, and indeed, Skunder was often referred to in conjunction with this movement. Yet he was interested not only in the Surrealists’ fascination with objects that were created or discovered by the unconscious but also in the objects’ political potential. He spent a lot of time at the Musée de l’Homme at Trocadéro, where the static figure of

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Figure 3.7 Skunder Boghossian. The

Nourishers Series. 1963. Dimensions unknown. Charcoal on cardboard. Ethiopian Observer.

the “rootless” Negro was represented in a state of ethnographic anonymity. He recognized that these objects were taken out of time as unchanging Others. For Skunder, the critical concern involved the intellectual, legal, and ethical grounds underpinning the ways in which African cultures and material heritage were treated and displayed. His experiences at the Musée de l’Homme relating to African art and its imposed representation also determined the visual construction of the Nourishers. Certainly, African cultural productions can broadly be considered as composites of forms, spirits, actions, and oral sagas whose meanings are communicated separately and in tandem. Likewise, the Nourishers playfully merged images by estranging and coalescing them even as they were dividing. In 1963, when Skunder had completed the Nourisher series, Louise Atcheson, a Parisian art critic, wrote: “Skunder’s figures painted with graphic precision and a dexterity of line, rise vertically in totemic design, speaking to each other sensually in a dialogue of organic force.”51 That year, Skunder had also read Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1952), a book that he persistently referred to throughout his life. As Solomon said, it is difficult to imagine how the paintings that were done during the period that started in 1963 “would have turned out had Tutuola not come into the picture.”52 Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola gained fame with this novel. The book was based on Yoruba folktales and narrated in pidgin English. It recounted the mythological tale of a drunken man who followed his dead tapster into “Deads’ Town.” The book presented a world of magic, ghosts, demons, and supernatural beings. Skunder found in Tutuola a contempt for European literary conventions and standards, and this disregard motivated an exciting

plastic vocabulary that made the African continent a comprehensive cultural context. Tutuola’s creative and playful imagination aroused them all: the vastness of heaven and its creatures and the immense spatiality of mortals from the bush. Of Skunder’s painting Juju’s Flight of Delight and Terror, Solomon noted: “As terrifying vast births take place, space penetrates space, spaces are nested within spaces. The vision menaces and delights at the same time. Images both attack and play. No doubt, reading Tutuola had something to do with the initial conceptualization of this canvas, but nothing in Tutuola leads to the range of energy in this painting.”53 Made Figure 3.8 Skunder Boghossian. Juju’s Night Flight of Dread and Delight. 1964.

56.5 × 62.5 in. Oil on canvas with collage. Courtesy of the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. Purchased with funds from the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest).

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one year after the Nourisher series, Juju’s Flight of Delight and Terror (1964) and Juju’s Wedding (1964) indeed illustrated even more elaborate forms of African symbolism and iconography than previous pieces had presented. Juju’s Flight of Delight and Terror

Juju’s Flight of Delight and Terror is one of Skunder’s masterpieces. He had lost track of the work after selling it years earlier and did not know its whereabouts until he received a call from a New York gallery in 2000. He remembered having sold this piece to an African American colleague in the 1970s for the nominal amount of $1,450. But the colleague had died, and his widow, who did not know Skunder Boghossian and had no idea about the value and story of the painting, sold it to a New York gallery. The work is now in the collection of the North Carolina Art Museum. Painted in 1964, it depicts the prominence of creation and destruction, and indeed, as Solomon noted, the vision delights even as it equally terrifies. Fragmented images rise aggressively and ferociously from inside the darkness onto a sparkling surface. “A child,” Solomon commented, “innocent yet full of experience, might surrender to such a dream/nightmare.”54 This is a multimedia composition showing manifold views of various objects. The idea for it evolved in Paris at the height of Skunder’s acquaintances with African and African American artists and intellectuals, prominently including Wilfredo Lam. Lam’s representation of mysterious and primordial totemic images particularly inspired Skunder’s works. In the painting, shades of gray, beige, and ochre are carefully mixed with earthy tones. The canvas soars with two images emerging in the background: one has fear-provoking owlish eyes and neither hands nor feet, and the other depicts a startled cat attached to a long body with what resembles insect wings. Both are flying in the night over many dots and sparkles that mark the stars of the sky. The colors, lines, and shapes of this work are dark and only visible through the shimmering lights of objects. The objects evoke vivid tensions and belligerence, perhaps attempting to illustrate the accumulated resentment of the spiritual energies and forces of Africa, directed toward the caustic agents of colonial power. “The atmosphere of myth and magic frightens me,” Fanon said. “By terrifying me, it integrates me in the traditions and history of my district or of my tribe, and at the same time it reassures me, it gives me a status, as it were an identification paper.”55 Undeniably, Juju’s Flight of Delight

and Terror is an original work that shows how Skunder was intrigued by the vernacular of African intellectual thought, where fantastic yet disquieting symbolical attributes provoke as they ecstatically uphold African identity. As Solomon said, it is “a Genesis written by an author of Revelations born and reared in a pagan Africa before the ascendancy of the Patriarchate.”56 Juju’s Wedding

Completed in 1964, Juju’s Wedding is a mixed-media work and one of Skunder’s early experimentations with the magical scrolls.57 Perhaps the most important part of the magical scroll, which also persists in other images of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, is the representation of the eye. And as Jacques Mercier wrote: “Ethiopian scroll images immediately impress us in the West with their gazing eyes, which attract and captivate us.”58 Once more, the iconography of this work consists of African conceptual schemes. The owl yet again emerges as an iconic image. Its gazing eye is the focal point, at once confrontational and brazen as well as evasive and circumventing. Just as in Ethiopian church paintings, the eyes are positioned implicitly and proportionally. They are as captivating as they are illusive, and the viewer is forced to submit to their gaze. Images and textures merge and interlace, which is typical of Skunder’s renditions. These are the weaving compositions that he calls kulflfu (interwoven), which is a consistent theme in Ethiopian handicrafts. This interlacing of lines and textures also symbolizes Ethiopian medicinal scrolls, which depict the struggles between the spirits, objects, and dematerialization, as well as good and bad. Images are painted on two translucent scrolls, with the Ethiopian weaving pattern (tebeb) visible on the bottom of the scrolls. In Juju’s Wedding, Skunder shapes the scrolls against intuitively retranslated forms, not only to invoke his ancestral spirits but also to assert his experience and difference. In 1964, Skunder Boghossian had his first solo exhibition, at the Galerie Lambert. Solomon Deressa reported that the Paris critics were almost unanimous in their positive appraisal. In 1965, Solomon wrote: True, his colors (five years ago) exploded with the intensity and directness of the equatorial sun. True, his 1963 canvases glow with the subdued rage of a hearth covered up to last the night and come to flames with the needs of dawn. But, is it ethnic origin for the one, and change of continent for the other that we are going to haul up for explanation? Be that as it may, neither

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origin nor any other circumstantial event would, if volunteered as explanation, be of much help to the spectator of the twelve canvases that composed the Galerie Lambert exhibit.59 In the latter part of 1964, Skunder worked with the founder of Surrealism, André Breton, and in 1965, he participated in the fourth Biennale de Paris. Skunder’s works in Paris deconstructed the notion of the “African authentic” that had reduced the ways in which African artists blended their social and aesthetic experiences with wider global sensibilities. His works in Paris subsequently served as a response to the period’s vibrant debate about an African modernity in the making. His experimentation with calligraphic art in Paris was an added dimension worthy of note, in which words were presented in ways that were both graphic and calligraphic, overturned and upturned, conscious and yet illusory. He started working on calligraphy while in the city and was heavily influenced by Ibrahim El-Salahi of Sudan, who was also in Paris and who worked on Arabic calligraphy. Skunder joked that an Ethiopian always sought abstraction with a bit of realism, and this was a motive for his Feedel (Ethiopic Ethiopian script) series. Not only did he use the Ethiopic script in the composition of paintings, he also molded it playfully on bark cloths, as I review later when I engage his bark cloth work entitled Time Cycle III. His use of the Ethiopic script ranged from humor to satire where words such as hateraw60 represented profanity that was combined with a penetrating parody and that simultaneously featured many levels of interpretation. Strangely, the term hateraw was often used in the 1960s by Skunder and two of his intimate friends—poet and playwright Tsegaye Gebremedhin and Solomon Deressa—to express not only sacrilege but also flattery and endearment. When I saw Skunder, Solomon, and Tsegaye in New York in 2001, the word was frequently uttered and shared, as if it voiced and caressed their love and longing for each other. They had not seen one another for more than twenty-five years. Skunder and Solomon had left for the United States before the 1974 revolution, whereas Tsegaye lived in Ethiopia through the military and subsequent regime and only traveled to New York in the late 1990s to receive medical treatment. And hateraw expressed it all: their deferred dreams and shattered hopes, as well as their integral spirit. Skunder’s visual contribution began in Paris and was indeed stylistic and conceptually complex. His art and its contextual meaning had influenced a generation of artists even before he went back to Ethiopia. Upon

his return in 1966, he taught at the Fine Art School for three years and then left for the United States in 1969, following his African American wife, whom he had met in Paris. In Ethiopia, he became particularly immersed in Ethiopian mythology, reflecting as he had done in Paris on the relationship between national consciousness and art. For him, art and its social context were inseparable, and his fundamental respect for the ancestral powers that were prevalent in his works in Paris, as well as their significance as the ultimate bearers of justice, grew and developed even further after his return to Ethiopia. He transformed Ethiopian cultural objects into works of literature and Ethiopian icons into discourse. The Ethiopia Years (1966–69)

Seeing one of my paintings, my zebegna [house guard] exclaimed, “Getoch [Sir], but that’s a dream!”61 —Skunder Boghossian What was this unceasing dream that absorbed Skunder after his return to Ethiopia? What were the cultural threads and imaginaries that he sought to represent? What were the symbols that he communicated with—the complex knowledge of good and evil, the abstract truths and ideas about life and its meanings? After returning to his homeland, he recognized that scholars had completely omitted mention of transcultural African influences on church art, which Skunder easily fused into his works while he was in Paris and which one can easily identify in Ethiopian church paintings and architectural forms. For instance, the concept that he indicated as kulflfu (the interlocked) or hareg (vine, weaving), found on every page of Ethiopian illuminated manuscripts, can be easily explained in indigenous and cross-cultural African contexts. Furthermore, the glorious colors of Ethiopian manuscripts, which are exquisitely decorated with vines, are similarly displayed in Eastern and Middle Eastern Islamic manuscripts. Parchments that were used for support and colored in vegetable dyes in early Islamic manuscripts were used in the same way in Byzantine manuscripts. The connection between Islamic and Byzantine art is irrefutable, and the tradition of Ethiopian church art is naturally intertwined with both. However, the influence of the Islamic tradition on the stylized and symbolic representation of Ethiopian church art is rarely mentioned in studies of the art.

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To give full and comprehensive meaning to the history of Ethiopian art, it is imperative to study Islamic culture and art. Yet scholars who have studied church art exclude the influence or cross-cultural connection of Islam as if it had never been part of the history of Ethiopian art. Though they review changes in the styles of paintings after Ahmed Gran, the imam of the Adal Sultanate who invaded and occupied Ethiopia (1529–43), they fail to articulate what these changes were.62 Ahmed Gran was defeated by the Portuguese military in collaboration with Christian Ethiopians. This collaboration assisted the Portuguese in their rivalry with the Ottoman Turks for control of the trade routes in the Red Sea and the northwestern sector of the Indian Ocean. It is true that Gran’s reign caused mayhem and destruction, particularly to churches, monasteries, and Christian heritage sites. But Gran’s atrocities do not erase the fact that in earlier times, Christians and Muslims had not only lived side by side but also experienced cross-cultural influences. Skunder tried to connect them all. His weaving compositions, or kulflfu, followed his fascination with the hareg, which he connected to the unique consistency of Ethiopian handicrafts (the basket, the Ethiopian national dress, and so on). He embellished his paintings with these same patterns, with a delicate and yet chaotic relationship to African symbols and iconographies. He noted: “The mentality of aesthetics in the African world is that it allows itself to learn from each other, ezaw bezaw erasu berasu [on top of another and right there and then]. One does not compete with the other, one color complements the other, as if learning from the prior one, just like one learns from the elder and works on the elder’s work to come up with something higher.”63 When Skunder Boghossian went back to Ethiopia in 1966, Addis Ababa was also home to the Organization of African Unity, and the city had been transformed into a vibrant hub of cultural intersection. As I indicated in chapter 2, it was an exhilarating time at the Fine Art School, where the poems of Gebre Kristos Desta, Solomon Deressa, and Tsegaye Gebremedhin were presented, as were the visual arts of Skunder and Gebre Kristos. Solomon was an art critic, a novelist, and a poet, and Gebre Kristos was both a painter and a poet. At the Creative Arts Center on the Sidist Kilo Campus of Haile Selassie I University, artists and writers converged for poetry recitals, performances, and art exhibitions. Skunder’s work had inspired and mesmerized many students at the Fine Art School. One hallmark of these young students was a fashionable

rejection of tradition. For the older intellectuals, it was trendy to seek prestige with an emerging viewpoint and a sensibility that valued and symbolized fragmentation and existential doubt in artworks and poetry that they insisted were free from imposed meaning. The popularity of self-discovery in art, in particular, was an essential feature for art critics Solomon Deressa and Kifle Biseat. In magazines such as Addis Reporter, as I elaborated in chapter 2, Solomon reiterated the importance of nonrepresentational art to the modern mind. Thought unfolding through nonrepresentational symbols became the sign of an intellectual’s cachet. Skunder’s art was impressive to young artists, with its belief in the arbitrary and its fragmented and dreamlike narrative. Moreover, Skunder was eccentric and original in his unforgettable teaching performance, which dazzled many of his students. He would invite them to his home and get them acquainted with the beat and tempo of African music, as he himself danced to the rhythm. Abdelrahman Sheriff, who started teaching at the Fine Art School in 1964 and was its director from 1974 to 1991, commented on the state of the school and Skunder’s popularity: Both Skunder and Gebre Kristos were very influential to their students after coming back from France and Germany respectively. Skunder nevertheless was immensely popular and many students copied his self-image as well as his art. It was very difficult to teach students the theoretical approaches to modern art at that time. For one, teachers themselves did not have the theoretical background and were instead totally involved in the pictorial conception. Modern art was fashionable and was the thing to do. Students also came from a background that was educationally challenged. For them too it was trendy to paint like Skunder without understanding the conceptual link to his works.64 Indeed, students were enamored of Skunder, who had just recently returned from Paris. Zerihun Yetimgeta took up the “shemane loom,”65 which Skunder introduced and which Zerihun continues to work with even today; other students took up the scrolls and the different symbols for which Skunder had become well known. One can still see the outlines of Skunder’s originality in many contemporary works. But the reenactment and return of silenced histories and subalternized knowledges that he attempted to bring into his visual vocabulary did not lead his students to a

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radical epistemological shift. They were simply captivated by the originality of his images rather than by the epistemic decolonization that the images set out to accomplish. What was even more ironic was that Skunder himself did not talk publicly about the concepts that his aesthetic critiqued. Had he spoken about the ethical and aesthetic values of his works, perhaps friends such as art critic Solomon Deressa could have been compelled to engage with the concepts of decolonial aesthetics. Instead, however, Skunder’s images were described by Solomon in general frames and phrases, such as “Skunder’s special feel [for] matter”66 or his “genius for perpetual motion.”67 When Skunder had his first solo exhibition at the Creative Arts Center in 1966, he recapped and modified the projects that emerged in Paris to a variegated enunciation of the Ethiopian experience, of which Solomon wrote, “Skunder’s paintings vibrate with a subdued violence emanating from the tension of forces pulling in the opposite direction.”68 The encounters and relations between Skunder’s art and the transnational political context in which the aesthetic emerged were completely overlooked. In Skunder’s paintings from 1966 to 1969, one sees the existence of a whole different universe that is evoked in African mythological cryptograms. He found this universe in the Ethiopian church iconographies, just as he had found it in Paris at the Musée de l’Homme in Trocadéro, only this time he was able to unite the African symbols with cyphers of the Orthodox Church. He situated agency in the core of past analysis that shed light on present-day knowledge. He explored new possibilities to narrate the stories of people from the margins, valorizing those aspects of intellectual and creative works that were excluded from mainstream art projects. By positing a historical continuity of “Africanness” or “blackness,” extending from early African civilizations to Ethiopian Orthodoxy and its variant expressions, he skillfully managed to combine two seemingly contradictory themes: a traditional approach to culture and its complex ties with the historical development of European art. Whereas the Paris years brought new spiritual viewpoints and fresh imagery about Africa and the African experience to Skunder’s paintings, his works after he returned to Ethiopia mediated spaces between tradition and modernity, particularly the tradition of the Orthodox Church and the understanding of the modern world within this theology. For many Ethiopian believers, icons of the Orthodox Church strictly serve as links between the human and the divine and are only worshipped as instruments of miraculous

intervention. They provide valor and strength in a world marked by tragedy and suffering. Yet for others in the same Orthodox Church, debtera amulets serve as medicinal objects whose purifying purpose is to ward off evil with the power of devotional Christian texts. It was this unique blend of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, unifying pre-Christian indigenous practices with Christian beliefs, that fascinated Skunder and enticed him for the remainder of his life. This harmonious and yet ambiguous fusion between animism and divinity, between the pagan and the Christian, is the source of his luminous scrolls. For Skunder, the fortitude of the pagan and the unadulterated spirituality of the Christian became one and the same. He called the scrolls dancing scrolls—the jujus celebrating the glories of the gods. It is important to look critically at Ethiopian Christian art within the Orientalist construction that I expounded in chapter 1 and consider its incongruity with Skunder’s works, which continually sought to heighten the African experience in its many shapes and forms. In a visceral way, Skunder imaginatively responded to the illuminations of manuscripts and the astonishing visual unity of the icons and church murals through an overt connection to the spiritual and abstract dimensions of African art. After returning from Paris, he absorbed himself not only in the images of the church but also in canvases full of time, memories, historical events, and symbols. At the same time, Skunder presented the wider social and political context of Africanness, in which modernism was at once political and historical. Through process and ephemerality, he simultaneously attended to Saint George and the Dragon, which is a frequent image in the Ethiopian Orthodox repertoire; to the Akan fertility spirit of Ghana; to the eagle that is prevalent in many African cultural contexts; and to all the other symbols of African social narratives. Skunder’s art, therefore, brought a new African cultural insight into Ethiopian church art and, through the integration of these two fields of knowledge, brought them into dialogue. One could say he followed AfroCuban artist Wilfredo Lam’s amity with Santeria, a religion rooted in African culture. As I indicated earlier, Skunder became acquainted with Lam and his works while he was in Paris. Santeria is famous for its magic based on the mysteries of the gods, and to interact with gods is believed to better one’s life. A thematic play of a particular understanding of modern subjectivity among people of African descent, Santeria had been the source of Lam’s “mythical totemism.”69 The effects of this mythical totemism are evident in Skunder’s

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works, and as Solomon said, “Lam’s Cuban voodoo-surrealist imagery, like Skunder’s period of abstract symbolism, once contemplated, is almost impossible to shake. But, ‘dissolve’ them fast. Skunder did.”70 With a hint of Lam’s deranged sense of reality, Skunder bargained with the gods, and in the process, he also evoked the interlacing and merging of images and textures. These are the weaving compositions that Skunder called kulflfu. Art history has given its voice of authority to artists, such as Skunder Boghossian, who indulged in fantasies of the spirit as “magical realists.” Although such modalities are useful in denoting the existence of spirituality in a form of art, they do not encourage the variant readings of spirituality as existential spheres of influence. For example, the uses of the supernatural in non-Western literatures, from the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez to that of Salman Rushdie, are grouped together under the rubric of magical realism. But these works cannot simply be described in terms of dichotomies such as reality versus fantasy. As Brenda Cooper has argued with regard to the literature of Ben Okri, Syl Cheney-Coker, and Kojo Lang in Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye (2003),71 it is the negotiation of the middle space that is important to understand. Cooper insisted that through writing styles such as irony, parody, pastiche, paradox, the grotesque, riddles, and mythical allusions, these writers produced complex works of art that depict their cultural, political, and social experiences in many dimensions: seen and unseen, visible and invisible, rational and mysterious. It is within this critical third space that I want to look into the debtera scrolls (Figure 3.9 and Figure 3.10) and Skunder’s fascination with them until the end of his life. For Skunder, the debtera scrolls were an aesthetic choice that best represented the intangible aspects of place and the religious naturalizing of the supernatural, as well as a distinct African art whose inspiration was the intuition of a world force. The typical debtera degemt (talismanic prayer) starts with Besme Ab Weweld Wemenfes Kedus (In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit) and continues on with names from the heavenly world and some demons as well; it ends with the Christian name of the person to be healed. When Skunder lived in the United States, he started his day by sprinkling his house with Ye Mikael Tebel (Saint Michael’s Holy Water), which friends routinely took to him from Ethiopia to ward off evil; in the background, the music of Nina Simone or John Coltrane played. During

Figure 3.9 Henok Melkamzer. Ethiopian zodiac.

2017. 90 × 110 cm. Natural pigments over a canvas. Courtesy of Henok Melkamzer.

Figure 3.10 Henok Melkamzer. Detail of Figure 3.9.

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the course of the day, with incense burning, he turned to West African jujus, asking for forgiveness and blessing. He believed his fate was predestined by the ancestors, whether it was Mikael of the Orthodox Church or the West African juju. For him, they were one and the same—invisible powers that were at a higher ambit, guiding the physical world. His was not a declaration of faith but a secular concern for the fundamental respect for the ancestors, which affirmed the integrity of African heritage (itself a product of converging experiences of history). He once refused to work in a studio that he rented while working for the Ethiopian Embassy’s Wall of Representation project, claiming that his assistant had worked in the studio before his initial communication with the jujus. He connected spiritual thought and practice to everyday acts, tying the supernatural with the natural and the mundane. He believed that these beings were to be found anywhere and everywhere. Debtera amulets are illuminated with images representing an intricate collection of networks and flowcharts, illustrating the processes by which what is exterior becomes interior and what is closed is also open—ultimately expressing the ambiguities of good and evil. I could not be sure whether Skunder understood the technical interpretation of these scrolls, but he often used their original parchment, which he scraped and washed in order to remove the original work. Frequently, it was hard to totally eliminate the original image, and he was left with subtle vestiges of it. On these almost imperceptible images, he juxtaposed his amazing creations. He painted symbols such as the bird and the serpent on the parchments. Such images recur in many church paintings and are also found in other African visual representations. Through these scrolls, Skunder illustrated the Janus face of Ethiopia’s artistic heritage, where the devotional and the magical fused. Mercier commented on this duality: When the representational images on the scrolls are captioned, the inscriptions resemble those in religious paintings. “Image of Michael,” they say, or “How Our Lord told the demon to be silent.” Also as in religious paintings, these images illustrate certain texts, among them the passages from the Gospels describing Christ’s healing miracles. It is unsurprising, then, that scroll images and religious paintings are sometimes iconographically and stylistically identical. . . .

If angels are very present in a scroll, they are usually Phanuel, the “expeller of demons . . . ,” who is little known in religious life but appears often in the scrolls.72 Skunder introduced the modernist renditions of the scrolls in 1966 after he returned to Ethiopia, initially to his students at the Fine Art School and everywhere else thereafter. Many Ethiopian artists have since deployed these works in their art without really comprehending the ambiguous third space that he tried to negotiate. Several Western curators and historians have written on the debtera scrolls and how Ethiopian artists have employed these forms. Yet Skunder’s contribution to this larger investigation and his influence on other artists’ scroll paintings are largely disregarded, mainly because contemporary Western historians and critics are unfamiliar with his works. For instance, in the catalog Wossene Worke Kosrof: Writing God’s Other Name (2006), C. Daniel Dawson stated: Coming as he does from Ethiopia, it is not surprising that Wossene has an understanding of art as medicine. Ethiopian culture has a long tradition of magical healing scrolls and paintings, as well as rituals and music with the same intent. . . . For me, Wossene’s concern with the processes inside his paintings has helped him develop a personal language of visual relationships. Not only are his paintings composed of specific types of symbols, letters or words but these elements have a relationship with each other.73 What are the “symbols” or “zones” that Dawson noted? When Skunder used them, it was with deep reverence for the meaning of these symbols and deference to their profound cultural implications. For instance, in Figure 3.11, some of the images that interconnect the scrolls seem to beckon the ancestral gods; others rejoice in the presence of the gods. The critical practices championed by artists such as Skunder Boghossian during the colonial and immediate postindependence eras should not be sidelined, for these artists have greatly contributed to the vision and critical imagination of second-generation African modernists including Wossene Kosrof. Since Wossene is particularly known for his use of debtera scrolls, it is imperative to explore the cultural contexts of these scrolls, as well as the history behind their modernist execution.

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1998. Pastel on paper. 102 × 80 cm. Courtesy of Elizabeth W. Giorgis.

Figure 3.11 Skunder Boghossian. Untitled.

Wossene was a student when Skunder taught and experimented on the scrolls at the Fine Art School. “Out of all of us who were students of Gebre Kristos and Skunder,” said classmate and colleague Tadesse Mesfin, “Wossene was probably the one who took most of Skunder’s formal qualities.”74 Skunder’s students included Yohannes Gedamu and Zerihun Yetimgeta, in addition to Tadesse Mesfin, and they all remember Skunder’s use of parchment scrolls in the Fine Art School as well as their own fascination with his use of this particular medium to produce some of the fantastic images of Ethiopian modernism. Whether Wossene’s use of the magical scrolls was influenced by Skunder is not the issue here. A proper art historical analysis should credit Skunder Boghossian for being the pioneer who juxtaposed traditional parchment scrolls with a modernist vocabulary. Parchments were also used in the early modernist executions discussed in chapter 1. However, Skunder’s significant evocation of themes that reflected unique techniques, applications, and ideas was the first in Ethiopian modernism’s history. The US Years (1969–2003)

In 1969, Skunder left for the United States, where he would actively participate in the civil rights movement. He was invited to become an artist in residence at Atlanta University, as well as resident instructor in sculpting, painting, and African design at the Atlanta Center for Black Art. He joined the staff of Howard University in 1972 and taught painting until 2001, playing a major role in bringing second-generation Ethiopian artists such as Tesfaye Tessema and Elizabeth Atnafu to the school. Skunder joined Howard at the height of the Black Power movement. While there, he continued to show works that he had been passionately involved in both in Paris and Ethiopia. African art curator and historian Salah Hassan (1995) wrote: Skunder’s impact goes beyond the modern African art movement to artists of African descent in the African diaspora. Arriving in the United States in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, Skunder witnessed the rise of the Black Power Movement. The emergence of liberation and decolonization movements in Africa during the 1950s and 1960s became a tremendous source of inspiration and solidarity among artists of African descent. The search for

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a new vocabulary rooted in the African experience, which accompanied these movements, has its share of cross influences among African American artists. Skunder has been an integral part of this.75 The artist continued to exhibit his works widely across the United States during the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. In his last solo exhibition, at the Studio Museum of Harlem in New York in June 1972, Rosalind Jeffries, curator of the museum at that time, said about Skunder He is the receptor of the drama between old and new, contrasting forces in operation. In observing old energies, interacting with the forces of our fast changing society, he raises questions as to our value system, man’s humanity to man, man’s humanity to the universe; questions as to the relationship of American stars and stripes “the eagle” to the traditional bird symbol and from the ancient times throughout the continent of Africa. There is an implied indication perhaps as to the continuity of African cultures, and the unity of Blacks throughout the world. This artist’s analysis of the forces of life causes us to reexamine our role on earth and what is actually happening to us. He speaks of survival. His violent cries both soft and strong must be heard.76 Of Skunder’s works from the 1980s, his experimentation on bark cloth is especially noteworthy. Bark cloths are frequently used for burials in East African communities. The cloths are fragile but are submerged in mud for an extended period of time to gain sufficient durability and strength to hold human remains. Skunder collected the material during a trip to Uganda. He sculpted figures on these cloths so meticulously that once they were finished, each ascent was followed by a descent, and each curve gave way to another curl. One of Skunder’s prominent works on bark cloth, Time Cycle III (Figure 3.12), at first glance looks like an Ethiopian warrior’s shield (gasha). The piece is a somber composition. The beauty of the material’s natural tone accentuates the textures and forms that are molded on the cloth. Solomon found this work to be a profound narrative of nature’s grandeur that represents the entrance to a mysterious temple where beasts stand guard.

Figure 3.12 Skunder Boghossian. Time Cycle III. 1981. 48 × 48 in. Embossed bark cloth. Courtesy of the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville. Museum purchase with funds provided by the Caroline Julier and James G. Richardson Acquisition Fund and the Charles P. and Caroline Ireland Foundation. Photo credit: Randy Batista.

Skunder’s fascination with the universe and its complexity took on a unique dimension in Time Cycle III. For this work, he placed the bark on suitably shaped foam boards, such as egg containers, for several days until the contours of the board were firmly situated. He then hardened the mold on the bark cloth by using bonding agents. The bark’s natural earth tone

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was then harmonized with tints of natural oil, bringing out the grain and color of the bark and enhancing its natural beauty. For the viewer looking at this work, the warm earth tone creates a sense of peace, but the sharp images on the panel complicate and disturb its serenity. And the different forms create a sense of place without providing all the details, continually drawing the eye back to find something new. The natural wrinkles of the cloth also give the texture of the surface its unique organic dynamism. As in Ethiopian church panel paintings, images are repeated from different points of view in this work. Symbols resembling an African mask and a serpent menace from the cloth, with spatial relations that evoke the tension of competing forces. The themes in this piece provoked heated engagements and somber conversations touching on everything from mathematics to architecture among friends who visited Skunder’s home and work space. Currently owned by the Harn Museum in Florida, the piece remained with Skunder for many years because he did not want to part with it. His friend Gossa Gebreselassie, a mathematician, recalled: Theories of mathematical desiring (algorithmic) consistency and relative consistency were my subject of study when I met Skunder. Somehow this description of my activity to Skunder transformed itself into a description of relative consistency across subjects and experiences of coherence that define the possibilities of freedom and pleasure, the generation of sound or images and ultimately living spaces. [The] Skunderian approach to knowledge acquisition unifies the verbal and the non-verbal. His working/living space turned out to be a timecycle where vibes flourished.77 The socialist military junta in Ethiopia and its gruesome rule from 1974 to 1991 brought depression into Skunder’s life, and many of his works during this period narrated the themes of repression and misery that pervaded his country. In 1975, when the hopes stirred by revolutionary sentiments were beginning to fade, Skunder produced works such as Inferno at Axum (Figure 3.13). Painted in a powerful flaming red, the piece evokes disturbing images as it intimately recounts the ravages of conflict. The shade of red indicates anger, power, danger, and the promises of a red Communist flag that are at

Figure 3.13 Skunder Boghossian. Inferno at Axum. 1975. 69 × 56 cm. Collage on board. Courtesy of Elizabeth Giorgis.

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once shattered and defaced in its complicated conversion into the textures and sensibilities of Ethiopian history. Axum, the cradle of civilization, is burning in Skunder’s Inferno, and its emotional impact, real or imagined, inevitably captures the essence and flow of carnage and despair in history. Green-garbed soldiers are running at the back of the obelisks, armed with Kalashnikovs, and the three obelisks of Axum are engulfed in flames. Also reminiscent of the wide-ranging colonial and postcolonial histories of Africa, the piece renders the continent’s many interminable upheavals all at once. Skunder presses the viewer to seek redemption. It is difficult to imagine that such a bloodbath will ever be redressed, but Skunder, who always believed in salvation, wants the viewer to escape this mayhem by recalling its cruelty and suggesting that the conundrum of redemption lies only in remembrance. The artist often referenced Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” when talking about the pieces he made during the Derg military regime. Some of the song’s lyrics follow: Old pirates, yes, they rob I Sold I to the merchant ships Minutes after they took I from the bottomless pit But my hand was made strong by the hand of the Almighty we forward in this generation triumphantly78 Skunder made razor incisions on several overtures of Inferno in order to make the obelisks glare in flame. By contrast, the surfaces of the different cuts appear to permit the flame to breathe and expire. Furthermore, when natural light penetrates the painting, one sees three luminous and awesomely attractive obelisks. As is characteristic of many of his pieces, Skunder strategically invokes brilliance to respond differently to feelings of darkness and gloom, that is, evil and its dematerialization. Thus conceived, one can see the irrevocable redemption that he always sought, and through the glimmer of natural light, a feeling of reconciliation pervades the entire image.

As indicated elsewhere, the art establishment always presented Skunder’s earlier works alongside those of artists of the 1960s political movements. If he was exhibited at all in the 1990s and thereafter in frameworks outside the independence and civil rights movements, it was with other Ethiopian artists in a context that neglected his divergent experiences and in exhibitions that packaged artists in vogue tropes such as “diaspora” and “exile.” For instance, in a 2003 exhibition titled Ethiopian Passages: Dialogues in the Diaspora at the Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., the works of Skunder Boghossian were placed with those of Julie Mehretu and eight other Ethiopian artists, in an unrestrained terrain of diaspora as the focus of inquiry and with plausible currencies of the time such as “exile” and “trauma. In the opening section of the show’s catalog, under the title “Poetics of Diaspora,” the curator of the exhibition cited Salman Rushdie’s essay “Imaginary Homelands” and stated that this famous exile’s ruminations upon one of the defining features of the twentieth century, “the condition of migrancy . . . set the frame for fruitful investigation of the linkages between diasporic experience and the making of visual arts. In an increasingly mobile society, contemporary artists who have engaged with these now common experiences help us to understand better the contours of diaspora and exile.”79 Right from the beginning, the curator introduced the concepts of diaspora and exile and implied a sense of interconnectedness between the two notions. Skunder Boghossian, Ethiopia’s avant-garde modernist, left his homeland in 1969 and followed his African American wife to the United States, whereas Julie Mehretu, who comes from a mixed background of Ethiopian and American parentage and was born in 1970 (a year after Skunder emigrated to the United States), left her country at an early age and became one of the most successful female artists of the decade in the West. Skunder started his artistic career by challenging the concept of the primitive in Paris with the likes of Wilfredo Lam. Julie started her career in the early 1990s and became one of the leading artists of the West in the year 2000. The specific histories and experiences of these two artists should indicate the radical differences in the essence of diaspora and the way identities have been constituted in the experience of diaspora. It is ironic that although Skunder lived in the United States for over thirty years, he was rarely considered a diaspora artist until the 2003 exhibition and was not able to enter the exhibition halls of major art platforms

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that had, in the previous few decades, indulged in notions of diaspora when exhibiting contemporary African art. For these venues, Skunder did not fit the discursive space of diaspora, as he was considered part of a culture of resistance in which the art world was no longer interested, even though he continued to narrate social variations of diasporic consciousness until his death. This discussion opens an investigation into the ways in which our understanding of diaspora has evolved from the early theories of independence and liberation movements to the current age. Today, notions of diaspora are constructed under ambiguous terms such as exile, displacement, and trauma—frameworks that should be critically evaluated. Modern scholars have interrogated the genealogy of the term diaspora itself. Rasheed Araeen, for example, has argued that postcolonial theory, “which is supposed to be challenging dominant assumptions, has in fact reinforced these assumptions.”80 He also has written that he is “concerned with those ideas which articulate the experiences of postcolonial mass migration, and which then prescribe and legitimate the art practice not only of those who are presumed to have undergone these experiences but anyone who has migrated to the West . . . based on an assumption that every postcolonial migrant has suffered displacement, loss and is now exiled from his or her original culture or home.”81 Although I do not believe that Skunder Boghossian was in exile within the exilic condition the exhibition suggested,82 the discursive notion of this particular event portrayed him as a diaspora artist who had escaped his country’s “ills,” such as famine, poverty, and war, ultimately decontextualizing his experiences of diaspora. Skunder Boghossian left a huge mark on Ethiopian modernism, and artists still execute variations of his work. He explored new possibilities in articulating that modernism. His span of experience should have defied any standard categorizations. However, his work fell prey to the artistic canon that legitimated certain expressions of art and archived the rest in works fitting under the rubric of anticolonialism. Most emphatically, he was part of a culture of resistance in the 1960s, but he also continued to narrate social variations for many years. The Students: Zerihun Yetimgeta and Desta Hagos

Students of the Fine Art School were captivated by the novelty of the works of Skunder Boghossian and Gebre Kristos Desta and by the intellectual

environment that surrounded these artists. The students came of age in the 1960s, an unparalleled time of impulse and courage, and this stimulating background to their youth enormously intensified their desire for what was perceived as modern and progressive. The popularity of self-discovery in art was an essential feature for art critics Kifle Biseat and Solomon Deressa, in particular. In An Introduction to Abstract Painting in Ethiopia (1971), Kifle surveyed the development of abstraction, in addition to the visual properties of form, color, and texture in articulations of abstract art. Stressing abstract art’s host of possibilities, he insisted on its scope of self-investigation, and much like Gebre Kristos Desta, he urged the viewer to comprehend. Though both Solomon and Kifle lived with Skunder Boghossian in Paris during the anticolonial movement and were similarly associated with icons of the movement such as Aimé Césaire and Cheikh Anta Diop, their reluctance to articulate the hierarchical power relationships between colonizer and colonized and its impact on the evocation of modern African art was perplexing. Whereas Skunder organically and effortlessly linked inclusion and exclusion in visual elicitations, his colleagues and friends—Kifle and Solomon—were preoccupied with writing about European art forms, rather than European modernism’s limits, structures of exclusion, and the totality of this experience and its impact on non-Western art. For instance, when Solomon was interrogating Gebre Kristos Desta’s works, which he had written much about, he was keen to explicate the forms and shapes of the artist’s type of abstract art, rather than critically interrogating how the history and cultures of the non-Western Other engaged the larger context of modernism. This disregard for the political, social, and cultural phenomena of Ethiopian modernism within the paradox shared by all non-Western modernisms was prevalent in intellectual and artistic thought, and it subsequently filtered into second-generation artistic practices and subjectivities. The artistic careers of second-generation artists emerged from the credos of their mentors, from a generation’s shared fantasies, and from its problematic categorizations of modernism and its unresolved complexities as well. Did students re-create, reposition, and manipulate their mentors’ thoughts to develop their own? Did they include the debates and conceptual complexities of colonial and postcolonial modernism that their African counterparts from newly independent states confronted? Did students have a pan-African sensibility that positioned them

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with other African artists? I believe that these queries probe the philosophical roots of the modernism of the 1960s that continues to broadly shape contemporary Ethiopian art. What is at issue, then, is the need for an appropriate genealogy of Ethiopian modern art between separate historical moments. An in-depth examination that captures the tempo and energy of second-generation artists of the 1960s is therefore necessary in order to regain primacy over an ahistorical relegation of contemporary works. Although the contemporary popular imaginary implies that Gebre Kristos Desta influenced many second-generation artists, the inspiration of his work can only be seen in a few of his students, including Yohannes Gedamu and Desta Hagos, although he taught almost all second-generation artists of the 1960s. Wossene Kosrof, who was a student of both Gebre Kristos and Skunder, remembered Gebre Kristos “as always interested in composition and always wanting his students to continuously improve in their sense of composition.”83 Wossene identified his early influences as Gebre Kristos and role models such as the Sudanese artists Ibrahim El-Salahi, Ahmed Shibrain, and Mohammed Omer Khalil. Yet Wossene’s past and present works, like those of many other students, can mostly be attributed to Skunder’s influence. In fact, so strong was Skunder’s effect on secondgeneration artists of the 1960s such as Wossene Kosrof and Zerihun Yetimgeta (and those who followed) that Tadesse Mesfin remarked, “Artists to this day follow, and sometimes worse, imitate Skunder. At one point, I even started a project called ‘Halt Skunder’ to stop Skunder’s sway by encouraging my students to do experimental works far removed from Skunder’s types of works.”84 Skunder Boghossian’s art impressed young artists of the time. Unlike Gebre Kristos, he included familiar and vivid themes of the Orthodox and African repertoire, such as the eagle and the serpent, and the students related to these. He taught at the Fine Art School for barely three years, but his playful personality and his works—which Zerihun Yetimgeta called “candy with poison” (keremela be merz)85—framed a distinctive conceptual form in second-generation artists of the 1960s, and they continue to filter into contemporary artistic production. But Gebre Kristos also left a significant imprint on students who followed Skunder, if not on the final outcome of the canvas then on fathoming the canvas’s complex contours—its lines, depth, and harmony in often intuitive and simultaneously grounded extensions. Perhaps the bold and elaborate compositions of Gebre Kristos’s

works were too much to grasp for young students. Masterpieces such as Golgotha are extremely difficult to reimagine and generalize. Not that Skunder’s paintings were less ornate or less complex, but they were proverbial and easily replicable, at least in a proximate way if not in their abstract and multifaceted totality. That Skunder’s early works were and continue to be replicated without their original cadence and energetic political referent, however, not only reduces and essentializes these early works but also marginalizes his contribution to the vision and critical imagination of African modernism. His symbolic images were appropriated and reproduced, but unfortunately, his anticolonial queries were seldom interrogated. Zerihun Yetimgeta

Born in 1943, Zerihun Yetimgeta attended the Empress Mennen Handicraft School and later studied at the Fine Art School, from 1963 to 1968. Gebre Kristos Desta taught him drawing for three years, and Zerihun said of him: “He was bold and taught his students through words.”86 Tadesse Mesfin remembered a student who made a painting of Addis Ababa’s evening skyline in which the yellow color pervaded the canvas, which was the student’s way of showing the night color. Gebre Kristos repeatedly asked the student to dim the yellow color, and when the student failed to do so, the teacher told the student, “Turn the light off. Everybody has gone to sleep.” Gebre Kristos critiqued his students’ works in a constructive way, and often with humor. Tadesse Mesfin also recalled a student who painted a man who wanted to poison himself. Gebre Kristos asked this particular student what he was doing and inquired, “Will he drink this poison?”: if so, “he wanted to make his hand expressive.” When class convened the next day and again the following day, Gebre Kristos noticed that the student had not done anything to change the painting. Tadesse remembered the teacher saying, “Come on, let him drink this poison or pour it out.” In another instance, when Tadesse Mesfin was painting a mill house with donkeys and people outside, Gebre Kristos commented, “Leave the donkeys in front of the mill house, let the people go inside and let them grind.”87 What Zerihun meant was that Gebre Kristos spoke in poetic beauty, reducing visual techniques to particular words and thoughts, thereby deceptively leading his students into intuitive feelings. The emphasis on

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moving painting toward nonrepresentation was at its peak while Gebre Kristos was a student in Cologne, and the autonomy of the medium was debated by critics such as Clement Greenberg. After returning to Ethiopia, Gebre Kristos reiterated to his students the use of the imagination in works of art, rather than its representational form, as a paradigm of the modernist idiom. Zerihun received his training from Gebre Kristos and printmaker Hansen Bahia (1915–78), who taught at the Fine Art School from 1963 to 1966.88 Zerihun did not meet Skunder until his fourth year as a student at the school. He had asked Skunder to advise him on his graduation work in 1968, and of Zerihun’s first attempt, Skunder had commented: “What happened to the horse, he looks dead while he should be rising unbound?”89 Zerihun had painted Saint George and the Dragon, and he remembered being baffled by Skunder’s remark about a work that he thought was his best creation. He said he repeated the painting with a horse and a dragon that were so uninhibited that Skunder remarked, “Now St. George is not only killing the dragon but looks like he is also trying to kill me.”90 The two men were friends from then on. “I found him very different and unique from other people,” said Zerihun.91 They went to exhibitions, bars, and the infamous Woube Bereha together, many times accompanied by critics and essayists Solomon Deressa and Kifle Biseat, novelist Sebhat Gebreegzabher, playwright Abate Mekuria, and visual artists Gebre Kristos Desta, Endale Haile Selassie, and Tewodros Tsige Markos. Zerihun recollected Solomon’s, Sebhat’s, Kifle’s, and Gebre Kristos’s restless and rebellious attempts to appropriate and transform diverse experiences and cultural contexts. He recalled the army fatigues they wore and the conversations they held, which frequently revolved around subjugation and imperial power and idioms of different kinds of art. Gebre Kristos Desta was also known for hosting lavish parties at his home for his writer and artist friends, including young students such as Zerihun and Desta Hagos. Zerihun had recently graduated from the Fine Art School, and he received his education and initiation amid an exceptional group of people—people who not only shaped the modernism of the 1960s but also contributed to the profound shift in modernism’s sensibility. And Zerihun attempted to grapple with it all. He said that his philosophical inspiration largely emanated from Skunder and that he followed Skunder’s staunch African metaphorical

allusions, as well as his philosophy in pairing art and its social context. But to fully comprehend what Skunder tried to articulate both in Ethiopia and in Paris was nevertheless overwhelming. On the one hand, the school lacked informed art historians and theorists who could teach students about the crises and schisms of African modernism within the larger framework of European modernism. And on the other hand, students such as Zerihun came from poorly funded public schools and were admitted to the Fine Art School after the eighth grade, which meant they had limited educational backgrounds. At issue, then, is how well students such as Zerihun Yetimgeta who followed Skunder understood the articulation of African modernism, that is, the complexity of Skunder’s appropriation, rejection, and permutation of European modernism. Students who followed Skunder instead emulated his works without really understanding their layered meanings, since the colonial experience that he presented so profoundly was peripheral to their understandings. Furthermore, for young artists such as Zerihun, neither the colonial narrative that Skunder articulated nor the Marxist-Leninist opposition that the intellectuals favored was simple to construe. Consequently, a hallmark of the young students of the Fine Art School, including Zerihun, was the appropriation of fashionable concepts such as freedom, individuality, and social justice that their seniors deliberated upon. Zerihun and other young artists could not unpack the full and true meanings behind Skunder’s works. The political geographies or genealogies may have been markedly obscure, but they still posited works that followed the telling events of the time. Partly inspired by the physical space of monumental artists such as Skunder and Gebre Kristos and literary intellectuals such as Solomon and Bealu, young artists absorbed what could be easily retrieved. Gebre Kristos’s works transformed with each canvas, perpetually reorienting in new forms, shapes, and objects—his was an aesthetic practice whose most emblematic and ubiquitous figure was the circle. Charged with the susceptibilities of colonial and neocolonial political violence, Skunder’s works, by contrast, took on a formal sensibility, considerably different from those of Gebre Kristos but articulating a fundamental awareness of colonial subjectivity. He, too, covered his canvas with recurring themes, but there were many from which younger artists could pick and choose. Zerihun’s artistic career emerged from Skunder’s symbols: the serpent, the eagle, the Akan fertility spirit, and many more, as

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well as the intellectual circle of dissent against imperial ideology. In 1969, Skunder left for the United States, where his works drastically shifted, but the artists that he had significantly impacted, among them Zerihun Yetimgeta, continued in the same tradition with minimal alteration. Zerihun started his career with canvas paintings but later changed to mixed-media compositions of wood, goatskin, and canvas. He is well known for his works on the shemane loom, which he first came into contact with through Skunder. Wax and Gold (Figure 3.14) is one of Zerihun’s representative works and stages versions of the loom. The work is painted on five wood registers that are divided by finely decorated woodcarvings and arranged like magical scrolls. The wood registers slightly protrude from the strips, giving the surface an illusion of depth. The scrolls are placed on each strip and are embellished in bright green and yellow colors. The emblematic representations of Ethiopian oval eyes are horizontally depicted throughout the composition, and an Akan akua’ba figure (wooden fertility doll) from Ghana is presented on the last two strips. Other symbols such as the bird and the fertility spirit are placed about the surface. Although it is representative of Skunder Boghossian’s work on the exterior, the image is stripped from the elaborate process that Skunder adopted. The intricate connection of lines, the density of symbols, the multiple and fragmented memories that the symbols evoke, the suggestive playfulness of miniature objects, and the punctuated gaps on the surface—all are crucial in Skunder’s narrative. Wax and Gold incorporates Skunder’s elements but in a visual form that merely sketches the apparent, missing its complex fault lines. Zerihun’s paintings can consequently serve as a frame through which to examine the modernism of the 1960s. The critical contingencies, inclusions, and exclusions at the core of modernism were neither imagined nor assumed by young students. Unfortunately, what started out as an auspicious visual modernist project was also foiled and was tragically replaced with widespread violence that lasted for seventeen years. Institutions that perhaps could have broadened these young artists’ critical fantasies and imaginations were literally halted. And artists of Zerihun’s age never quite recovered. Figure 3.14 (opposite) Zerihun Yetimgeta. Wax and Gold. 1991. 94 × 24 cm. Mixed media on animal skin and wood. Courtesy of Kresge Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing.

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Women in the Patriarchal Gaze of the 1960s and the Works of Desta Hagos

The modern history of Ethiopia continues to position women in a very disempowering narrative of gender, and notions of gendered identity remain heavily contested. What is peculiar is that a dominant male contemporary academic culture continues to steadily undermine rigorous scholarship in gender research. In its place, the core of research in Ethiopian gender studies concentrates on troubling notions of “women as victims,” excluding the historical experiences and the experiences of being women and thus destabilizing a range of references underwriting victimization itself. Yet, as part of Emperor Haile Selassie’s grand modernist venture, Ethiopia was one of the few African countries to have early on (in 1955) granted women the right to vote in the nation’s constitution. Without specific institutional structures through which women’s experiences could transfer, the promotion of women’s rights was merely advantageous and critical to the emperor’s image-building projects. Women were emancipated insofar as they were engaged in a socially acceptable manner that fit the norms of the rigid patriarchal structure. As a result, the participation of women in all spheres of economic and political life as provided by the constitution failed to meet the broader and fundamental challenge of taking on masculine constructions of gender. Indeed, male ideology has historically denied the validity of women’s histories, individual experiences, and subjectivities. But certainly, the writings by male historians on women patriots during the Italian occupation— among many, W/o Shewareged Gedle, W/o Assegedech Kebede, and W/o Abebech Cherkose—ought to be credited. In Beedme godana lay yeguzo tizita (A journey with age: memories) (2013), Belete Gebre wrote: “With a foreign made military belt around their waist; the slimmer ones around their thin waists and the heavy weight around their firm waist, women came out chanting to the public ‘I will die for my beloved country, I will go to war along with my brothers’ arousing the men around them and the women’s courage left the men with little choice to be discriminatory.”92 Still, many men mocked the efforts of women patriots who rose to defend their country against Italian aggression. According to Belete Gebre, a lot of these men compared women’s patriotic endeavors to the “end of the world,”93 claiming that the liturgical word of the Fekare Eyesus had

predicted: “In the eight thousand year (the end of the world), women will embellish their bodies with the armories of men, and this is a sign to the coming of the end of the world.”94 Despite the valiant military virtues of women fighting against Italian aggression, support for women’s suffrage did not ensue. On the contrary, women’s political influence was greatly reduced and their political power diminished after the Italian occupation. But as early as 1941, immediately after the occupation, women’s issues were debated by men, largely in the daily newspaper Addis Zemen. In a section called “Yewetatoch amed” (The youth column), men argued that women should not be granted equal opportunity because they were created simply to become domestic bodies. The few times when women wrote, they either expressed gratitude to the emperor for opening up schools for women or presented a sanitized image of the feminine. For example, Romanework Kassahun, the first female radio broadcaster in Ethiopia, frequently wrote on women’s makeup and comportment in Addis Zemen and Mennen magazine (1953–74). Not much changed in the 1960s, even amid the vibrant debates around modern subjectivity. Significantly, the literature of the sixties simply ignored the issue of female subjectivity and positioned gender differences in essentialist terms. In Bealu Girma’s novel KeAdmas bashager, for instance, the working “body” overwhelmingly concentrated on men, situating the female figure in clichéd images of acquiescence, as if male modernists such as Abera and Hailemariam, who desired utter change, feared the loss of this hegemony. The female body was presented as an enigma, particularly in KeAdmas bashager, erecting a barrier between the body and the institutional context in which that body was situated. Abera’s and Hailemariam’s entire discourse on women pulled women out of the context of their society to inscribe them as objects of Ethiopian erotica. Thus, Lulit, Abera’s lover, was portrayed as a vengeful femme fatale who used her beauty to trap men. In Adefres, Roman was Adefres’s lover, a representation of his masculine desire, but also his insignificant housemaid. When she slighted him, he said dismissively, “Gered nech beka! gered! (She is just a maid, finished! Just a maid!),95 thereby denying her any form of personhood and relegating her to the position of an objectified female, nothing more than a depreciated maid. Women were at the margins and rendered in both novels as sluts, maids, prostitutes, and sexually charged objects in narratives that fortified the gender hierarchy. In Addis Reporter, where the debates around

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modernism took on historical significance, the issue of modern feminine subjectivity was strangely absent, except in deliberations of fashions such as the miniskirt or in other frivolous conceptions of gender equality. In addition, only a few women had prospects equal to those of their male counterparts in the area of education. Generally, women were neither sent abroad (like many of the intellectuals of the 1960s) nor given the opportunity to join Haile Selassie I University for higher education. Most women enrolled in vocational schools, which were accommodating in regard to family and societal obligations. The emergence of the Ethiopian Student Movement, however, gave rise to women’s activism in the late 1960s. A major manifesto of the movement addressed “The Woman Question” and argued that women were doubly oppressed, based on class and gender. The interruption of student activism by the revolution of 1974 thwarted what seemed like a viable and concerted women’s movement at its inception, perhaps the first of its kind in modern Ethiopian history (as discussed in chapter 4). Many women died for the cause during the years of the revolution: if not killed during the Red Terror, they sacrificed their lives in the various underground guerrilla movements. And their histories have yet to be written. Within this intellectual background, Desta Hagos emerged as a young female artist. She was just sixteen when she joined the Fine Art School in 1964. “I entered the art school with the hopes and dreams of becoming an artist who could not only express my ideas but reflect the feeling and mood of everyday Ethiopian life,”96 she recounted. She was also part of the group of 1960s writers and artists that I discussed earlier, and she remembered the parties that Gebre Kristos Desta held at his house and the intellectual personalities who frequented them. She said she was too young to understand their conversations but was charmed by them. She also acted in Mengistu Lemma’s Dandew Chebude at the Creative Arts Center alongside Wogayehu Negatu, the period’s most active actor. One of the few female artists who joined the Fine Art School during the early years, Desta also recalled that Skunder Boghossian, Gebre Kristos Desta, and Hansen Bahia shaped her artistic subjectivity. There were two other female students with her—Menen Mengesha and Almaz Amensisa—but after graduating, they unfortunately did not pursue art as a career. Unlike many of the women artists who graduated from the Fine Art School but moved on to other careers or conformed to societal pressures to marry and raise children, Desta remained active as a professional artist.

Today, she is one of the few women artists in Ethiopia who are still producing a significant amount of work. Desta graduated from the Fine Art School in 1969 and had her first solo exhibition at the Ras Hotel; it was the first one-woman show in the history of Ethiopia’s modernism. Her graduation work was called The Stage (Figure 3.15). It depicts a woman wearing a yellow gown who is performing on what looks like a public stage, her arms outstretched as if giving a final pitch to the song. Two musicians are accompanying her. The first is an emaciated and starkly naked trumpeter holding his instrument in one hand. The other is a woman garbed in yellow, with one hand stretched toward the singer. An imposing figure of a man is lying on the floor looking injured. Painted in shades of red and black, his body shows no visible sign Figure 3.15 Desta Hagos. The Stage. 1969. 84 × 170 cm. Mixed medium on board. Courtesy of the National Museum of Ethiopia.

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of injury, although the image suggests a wound. His head is slightly lifted upward, and he is looking toward the singer. The audience is portrayed below the stage, from the rear. The glow of yellow light from the singer’s garb is reflected onto the audience, and the light recedes as it closes into the frame. Even with the audience’s invisible expressions, the viewer can still imagine their captivated faces from behind. Curiously, the image invokes multiple layers of interpretation. At first sight, it seems that the artist is merely offering the viewer a simple composition featuring a singer. The structure of the scene develops as the image draws the viewer’s eyes to different compelling elements, providing the viewer with several opportunities to participate. The enigmatic ambiguities in the scene appear to reflect the artist’s life. Actions and ideas come into view: the gaunt trumpeter possibly signifying helplessness, the fallen man representing defeat, and the singers indicating the power of female artists to tell their own stories. Perhaps Desta is commenting on the limits of female artists in Ethiopian modern art’s discursive strategy, while at the same time suggesting their stamina to contest the constructed myth of their femininity in the public sphere—in this case, nowhere else but on a grand stage. The spectacle of a woman on stage was still new in the 1960s. For the most part, women singers performed in azmari bets97 and brothels, as portrayed in Sebhat Gebreegzabher’s novels. Perhaps it was also she, the performer, who pulled herself out from the stereotypical image of “woman” to deconstruct predominant expectations and perceptions of femininity. The audience acts as witnesses, unrecognizable behind the viewer and in front of the performer as if approving in disguise. At a time when it was considered ludicrous to pursue a career in art, particularly for women, Desta did the unimaginable when she joined the Fine Art School. “My father,” she said, “encouraged me. I was lucky in that regard.”98 What is also worthy of note here is that even though women’s experiences differed greatly from men’s, women artists were examined and understood from a male politics of visuality; the hegemony of vision mainly organized around a masculine norm. As a result, female artists such as Desta Hagos were represented in terms of their relationship to canonical male artists such as Gebre Kristos Desta. As one of his students, she was, of course, influenced by his works, but her creations are often dismissed as mere Gebre Kristos replicas and relegated to the peripheries of Ethiopian modernism. Meanwhile, male second-generation artists who were also

influenced by their mentors (such as Zerihun Yetimgeta) have attained prestige in Ethiopian modernism’s negligible art historical documentation. The circle, bright colors, lines, easel-oriented landscapes, and flowers in many of Desta’s later works do bring to mind Gebre Kristos’s paintings, but they also evoke her own distinct flair. As she said, her mentor challenged her to succeed on her own terms instead of being a mimic: [Gebre Kristos] gave me the most difficult assignments, challenged me. He was my teacher for four years. I always worked hard, especially in the fourth year, and wanted to get A grades. He asked me whether I wanted to be the first. I certainly concentrated on my work, a woman among many young men, and I did not waste time by going to the cinema. He was a very genuine teacher. He spurred you on, searching to bring out the best in you.99 Desta Hagos continues to produce paintings today. In a country where art is generally made by men and for male audiences, she has struggled to gain access to Ethiopian art’s hegemonic masculine formation. In conclusion, I would point out that although the period’s aesthetic identity could have gained momentum—with time and further mediation between a modern universal and local particularities—all prospects for such a development were unexpectedly foreclosed with the revolution of 1974. The optimism and hope of an incredible group of people who cohesively fought for democratic values and practices were suddenly crushed when the military regime seized power. The paradox was that intellectuals and artists of the 1960s were themselves changed by the very events that they sought to affect. And “neither freedom from hunger and poverty nor the turn to industry was accomplished,”100 observed Andreas Eshete. On the contrary, many died, and many more were exiled. Bealu Girma was killed by the military junta. Yohannes Admassu died under mysterious circumstances during the military regime. Solomon Deressa and Gedamu Abraha left for the United States. And Gebre Kristos Desta went into exile there, dying alone in Oklahoma in 1981. His friend Tsegaye Gebremedhin, the poet and playwright, penned these lines and dedicated them to Gebre Kristos Desta: A foreign country this Oklahoma Took the colors from the soil of Ethiopia

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Past the promises of aesthetics From childhood friends and the jujus In your dreams cries your country’s bird Weeps in that foreign land in Oklahoma Tsegaye Gebremedhin, excerpt from Metne ya gedgeda (The agony of the blank wall) (Translation mine)101 Though Skunder continued to paint until his death, he did not return to Ethiopia after leaving for the United States in 1969. He felt forgotten and unacknowledged despite the fact that, contrary to his belief, many artists in Ethiopia looked for his works and even more imitated his pieces from the scant images they managed to obtain. And so in 1998, when he was approached by the Ethiopian Embassy in Washington, D.C., to make a mural for a new building the embassy had acquired, he was truly exhilarated. In the end, he was not happy with the outcome of the piece, but as a native son who wanted to leave a legacy, he gave something to a country that he feared had long since forgotten him; in the process, he also responded to the voices of his people that he had heard every day of his prolonged absence. He died in Washington in May 2003. Upon his death, African art historian Chika Okeke remembered him with the following poem: Adieu, the bearded one with colorful hands, The one with slender fingers That turned bristle and sable Into messengers of Ana, Or is it muse? Adieu, the wirehaired one Who drummed for dancing lines? And limned a million stars. Adieu, the eagle nosed spirit, Ambassador-at-large, From the land of splintered icons Adieu, Skunder Whose name went before him, Whose fame trumped his age. A spirit is in ascent, an ancestor departs102

Artists such as Desta Hagos and Zerihun Yetimgeta had barely begun to interrogate the conceptual materials that bore the traces of Ethiopian modernism when socialism declared modern art bourgeois and decadent. The paradox and ambiguities of the modernism of the 1960s had an aftermath that was far distant from the original account. Crucially as well, the Fine Art School whose intellectuals in the 1960s keenly responded, at least, to injustice and inequality ultimately bent to the political pressures of tyranny for seventeen years, as I discuss in chapter 4. The school has not been able to recuperate fully. Forty years later, its students are passionately trying to be global beings and locate their works in global political and cultural settings. But they do so with little or no encouragement for their fervent attempts and with little direction from their professors on how to interrogate their identities in the global context of colonial politics. As a consequence, Ethiopian artists’ engagement with colonial history and postcolonial subjectivity continues to be compromised.

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Chapter 4

Enat Hager Weym Mot (Revolutionary Motherland or Death) Art during the Derg, 1974–91

arts movement, simultaneously subjugated and reproduced in the 1960s, came to an end after the 1974 revolution, when the monarchy was abolished. Supporters of the revolution that was widely instigated by radical intellectuals of the period renounced the national ideas of monarchy and nation and sought to democratize. But the revolution was soon hijacked by a socialist military junta called the Derg (1974–91), which claimed the very same Marxist-Leninist political philosophies that had armed intellectual thought. With an absolutist state-sanctioned ideology, the Derg slaughtered thousands of Ethiopians under the call for “Revolutionary Motherland or Death.” Behind that rallying cry were horrifying stories of genocide that were later disclosed. The massacre of thirty thousand young men and women between November 1977 and mid-1978 was particularly atrocious. The Derg called it the Red Terror campaign,1 and officials claimed they launched the operation to wipe out “reactionaries” who were allegedly detrimental to the revolution. The creative

In its sheer contempt for the past, the regime represented a new historical consciousness and a new historical subject that denied past values. Literary and aesthetic values were deemed worthless and inconsequential. The arbitrary and opposing trajectories of historical memory between artists, intellectuals, and opponents, on the one hand, and the state, on the other, framed competing narratives of nationalism within the Ethiopian socialist nation-state. And in 1976, the Fine Art School revised its curriculum based on socialist ideology. It is within this broad historical framework and legacy that the visual culture of the period emerged. In this chapter, I try to provide answers for questions that flow from this tragic turn of events. What were the styles of pedagogy? And what were the strategies of resistance and the forms of response by artists and intellectuals? Furthermore, I look into the politics of famine and the attending visual representations of human suffering, perhaps some of the most amazing images in modernism’s history, whose effects have thus far shaped individual and collective memory. I believe the modernism of famine played a leading part in extensively expressing the loss of human poise and pride. In order to explore how issues of nationalism, history, memory, and identity were produced and employed by artists, I focus my examination on artistic practices that were elusively articulated outside the prescriptive identity of propagandist aesthetics. My argument is that by exploring these practices in the contexts of tyranny and its consequent cultural extensions, it is possible to understand that artistic practice was negotiated within often shifting parameters and as required by political conditions. I contend that Ethiopia’s seventeen-year experience with scientific socialism requires analysis beyond the apparent and observable, since multiple spaces translated its meanings in different ways. For instance, in the midst of the shock and disturbance produced by Ethiopia’s move to socialism, I believe many artists and literary intellectuals parodied the propagandist utopian ideal of the state while at the same time longing for utopia itself. Taking a self-conscious and dialogic approach to understand the artist and the literary subject—I was also a product of the period, and I fled to exile to escape the regime’s pandemonium—I argue that in images and words that often evoked narratives of protest, the uncertainties of tyranny were expressed in scientific socialism’s propagandist consciousness, which equally trivialized and parodied its moral acuities.

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Throughout this book, an interdisciplinary approach to aesthetic practice has been most relevant to my inquiry. This method is particularly useful in defining the parameters of artistic production during the period 1974 to 1991 because most artists who worked and lived during this time refuse to make the slightest connection with the specific history of their past. This invented amnesia by artists was significantly challenging, since artists spoke about the period but at the same time spoke outside of it— much like having a casual encounter rather than intimately associating themselves with its history of oppression. To a great extent, then, the process of my examination depended not only on reading the works of art but also on assessing other categories of cultural production such as music and the genres of writing that have productively but obscurely interrogated tyranny. I am indebted to a few artists, such as Bekele Mekonnen, Geta Mekonnen, and Behailu Bezabih, who were all students of the Fine Art School during the Derg. They provided me with valuable information about the images that I have examined. I would not have been able to easily invoke the meanings of the works had it not been for them. One critical point involves the whereabouts of experimental works that were produced without the period’s revolutionary referents. Many veteran artists told me they had made such works, and they also claimed they were in private hands. But the locations of these works are not known. And works found in official collections, such as those in the National Museum of Ethiopia, mainly echoed the official ideology of the state. One is therefore roughly confined to investigating the works of graduating students in the archive of the Alle School of Fine Art and Design, which I believe also reflect the climate of the time. Therefore, I want to emphasize that when I allude to artists, I am indicating artists who worked between 1974 and 1991; similarly, when referring to artists’ works, I am broadly referring to students’ works from the same period as well works that I have found in the National Museum of Ethiopia, which generally represented the ideals of the state. Revolution, Famine, and the Nationalist Imagination

In February 1974 and immediately after the uprising, art critic Seyum Wolde, who believed in the close relationship between art and socialist ideology, wrote:

The 1960s was an era of mutiny and defiance (Zemene Amets). Books that were read in secret and in the underground world were covered with newspapers deceptively concealed. Did they see me or not? Did they see my book or not? . . . Intellectuals were gripped with a particular idea of “Ethiopia.” What should Ethiopia look like? How should Ethiopia change? My Ethiopia! Our Ethiopia! Everybody talked about Ethiopia. Afewerk Tekle had painted Mother Ethiopia (1963) representing his version of Ethiopia; a young and beautiful mother she was. The intellectuals criticized his version of Ethiopia. And the censures were countless. They said Ethiopia was old, exploited, dried, used and abused and not this beauty that Tekle presented. . . . Everyone waited under the gloomy and cloudy skies of Ethiopia . . . and under the overcast laid the famine of 1973, the taxi drivers’ grievance and many more. The heavy cloud gave way to a thunderous roar. And then in February 1974, a violent rainfall!2 Indeed, three hundred thousand peasants from Wollo and Tigray had already died from famine when, on October 18, 1973, a British journalist named Jonathan Dimbleby made the world aware of Ethiopia’s agonizing catastrophe in a British television program called The Unknown Famine. The global imaginary of Ethiopia has ever since been associated with the hungry body and a body imaged outside the borders of humanity. In 1984, when Ethiopia was once more besieged by famine, the country’s social and cultural identities were reconstructed yet again through the emaciated body. Three years later, the cover of Time magazine asked “Why Are Ethiopians Starving Again?” The article stated: “Ethiopia, which has earned the unhappy honor of being rated the globe’s poorest country by the World Bank (average annual per capita income: + $110; infant mortality rate: 16.8%), is on the brink of disaster again. At least 6 million of its 46 million people face starvation, and only a relief effort on the scale of the one launched three years ago will save them.”3 Also on the cover of the magazine was the very corporeal image of a hungry Ethiopian mother and her child, as if starvation was a common Ethiopian context and a fundamental experience of Ethiopian collective subjectivity. Perhaps the most basic challenge that Ethiopians face today when living or traveling outside

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their country is the shifting image of their identity, which, more often than not, is unreservedly exchanged with the hungry body. And this continues to be the case despite the lapse of several decades since the most striking images of Ethiopian hunger were fixed in the Western imaginary. In the past, the biblical assurance that “Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” had given Africans in bondage the promise of freedom, together with a sense of pride and dignity. But in the famine years, Ethiopians prayed to God for the most basic, materialist need to survive as a nation. Of the imagination of Ethiopia in African American diaspora thought after the 1973 famine, William Scott remarked: “The time of the Ethiopian mind-set’s initial declension in America actually preceded the famines, wars, and state repression that have since engulfed Ethiopia and essentially destroyed its image as a black power center and agent of universal African deliverance.”4 The archive of imaginings that had constituted Ethiopia had a unique claim to antiquity that included the dynastic relationship with the House of Solomon and House of David—a citadel of pan-Africanism coveted and extolled by Africans on the continent and in the diaspora that was bitterly violated when Ethiopia indeed stretched her hands unto God in 1973. Emperor Haile Selassie, pan-Africanism’s most distinguished emblem, was seen feeding his lions with large pieces of meat and had allegedly spent $35 million for his eightieth birthday celebration in 1973—the very year that he denied to Dimbleby the existence of a famine even though thousands had already died from it. Centered on the province of Tigray, one of the epicenters of the famine, literary scholar Debebe Seifu’s poem “KeAxum chaf akumada” (A container on the edge of Axum) (1974) poignantly illustrated memories of history, collective consciousness, and fraternity in the midst of a disastrous calamity. Wondering for a solution, he sent a letter to Tigray Pleading for only one container of food, dying of hunger Tigray saw the letter and saw the container to be his own Sad and depressed he became Hunger he recognized was shared by all Tears clogged his throat Bitter breath, hard to swallow Leaning on the walls of the Obelisk of Axum

Empty gut, yet Tigray prayed to the Lord, chanted To his history that once was To the greatness he had learnt And hung the container on top On the edge of the history of Axum that once was Debebe Seifu, excerpt from “KeAxum chaf akumada” (Translation mine)5 Debebe built his rhyme on an old tradition whereby in times of bad harvest, farmers sent containers to other provinces, seeking either food or harvest-related materials. Tigray, the home of the famed Axum obelisk— an elemental substitute for Ethiopia’s consecrated reference and symbolic claim to the glorious distant past—begged its compatriots for food. But they could not oblige because they, too, were hungry and they, too, were deprived. Handed from one province to another, Tigray’s container finally returned to Axum, empty. Hopeless and forlorn, the people of Tigray placed a hollow and barren container on the edge of the obelisk of Axum. One of the most provocative revolutionary poets of the time, Debebe refuted the nationalist imagination of Ethiopianism, which had unjustly excluded the oppressed and disenfranchised and failed its citizens with respect to their most fundamental needs. But even before the famine of 1973, only a few intellectuals criticized the images of an ideal Ethiopia that were produced by artists such as Afework Tekle. Among those few was Dessalegn Rahmeto, who critiqued Afework’s “glorious” representations of Ethiopia in Challenge, the prominent and militant newspaper published by students at the university: The creativity of our Ethiopian ancestors is evident in the famed obelisks of Axum, in the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, in the hymns and melodies of Yared and in the numerous historic paintings, some of which unfortunately adorn the walls of European museums. Present day Ethiopia, untrue to this, has produced no such works of art. The reasons are not far to seek; an oppressive atmosphere . . . of course such a society has its own opportunist pseudo-intellectuals and degenerate artists. Ato Afewerk Tekle, this self-styled Ethiopian “artist” is among such. . . . Ato Afewerk dared to propose that the artist close his eyes to

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that which daily confronts the society by whose soil and sweat he, like all of us, is maintained and schooled. . . . Ato Afewerk hiding his true colors, by claiming “non-involvement in politics,” has refused to see the reality that is Ethiopia. . . . None of his works depict the true nature of the Ethiopian environment with all its poverty, disease and illiteracy.6 Such sentiments led to the emergence of the period’s revolutionaries— that is, their identification with Ethiopia was detached from the classical imagination of the country that many Ethiopians had taken pride in or that Africans in the continent and the diaspora had venerated. Theirs was an imagination of famine, poverty, and human misfortune, and at the very heart of their fight for self-determination were these cogent realities. To cover up an issue that so seriously affected the lives of many was also considered barbaric by revolutionaries, but they believed the imperial state had used this diversion as it murdered thousands of their fellow citizens. Understandably, then, the 1973 famine was one of the major precursors to the 1974 uprising. Revolutionaries condemned Afework Tekle’s celebrated rendition of Mother Ethiopia (Figure 4.1) as fictitious and representative of an idyllic world that only a few enjoyed. Mother Ethiopia depicts a mother holding a child in her right arm, symbolic of the Madonna and Child images in Christian Ethiopian paintings. Wearing white garments that are folded and elegantly creased, Mother Ethiopia looks tenderly at the child. She is fully draped in a white shama, and her golden brown face perfectly complements the tone of her garments. Her figure is tinted in contrasting shadows of blue. Her child looks fast asleep, also draped with the shama, as if the mother is protecting him from peripheral elements. Representative of Afework’s dramatic and expressionistic El Greco style, Mother Ethiopia’s facial features are elongated, with the archetypal northern Ethiopian features often seen in the artist’s works: straight nose, thin lips, and large eyes. Afework was from Ankober—the heartland of the Amhara people, who historically were the hegemonic group of northern Ethiopia—and the former kingdom of Shewa—the center of many centuries of dynastic rule. Perhaps that is why his imagination of the nation was characteristically expressed through the faces of the north, images that excluded the rest of Ethiopia from nation and narration.

Figure 4.1 Afewerk Tekle. Mother Ethiopia. 1963. 100 ×125 cm. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the National Museum of Ethiopia.

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Famine and Mother Ethiopia

In 1975, Afework was interviewed in Goh—a magazine that was established after the 1974 revolution by members of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Party (EPRP) but later changed its constituency. Speaking one year after the revolution when many enthusiastically anticipated a bright future, Afework insisted that artists should refrain from exclusively producing revolutionary themes. He believed they should instead express their multilayered experiences as human beings. “Beauty,” he said, “is not confined to class and class consciousness but is found all around.”7 When confronted by the interviewer, who said that his type of beauty was selective and that his paintings only represented the hegemonic cultural picture of the Amhara and Tigray, Afework responded: “Everybody thinks that I only do paintings such as Mother Ethiopia and Meskel Flower. Why do you concentrate on only these paintings? There are many paintings that I had done that are different.”8 And as if poverty was also pathological, he added, “Have you seen the painting of the poor girl who is infested with ‘lemts’?”9 (Lemts was the skin condition that afflicted Gebre Kristos Desta.) The responses to Afework’s interview were extremely curious, not only as rejoinders to his specific remarks but also as significant paradigms in the early, stimulating debates and conversations that surrounded the socialist state and its formation. For instance, Michael Tebebu responded as follows: Afework Tekle had said art is a reflection of peoples’ lives and that art is one and the same with the artist’s emotions. But it is not difficult to see which lives and which emotions Afework Tekle’s paintings depict. Living in a country of hunger, illiteracy and exploitation, it is baffling to talk exclusively about beauty and moreover only on the beauty of the bourgeoisie. To profess that this kind of art is an important legacy to future generations is also extremely disturbing and moreover insulting to the history of the oppressed. Tekle’s emphasis on artists’ emotions is troubling particularly when he alludes that an artist needs the canvas, the brush and the paint to simply help him live an opportunistic life as both oppressed and oppressor, pathetically interchanging with the artist’s emotions. To consider oneself a great Ethiopian artist and to be proud of

being formed as an artist within these principles is offensive to the Ethiopian revolution. (Translation mine)10 Distinct from Afework’s Mother Ethiopia, a number of most haunting and memorable images of the nation had emerged after the 1973 famine. Nothing in these images could better characterize Mother Ethiopia than her tears as she wailed for justice. What had been sanctioned and contained during the imperial regime emerged after 1974 in new forms of dissent. The historical and political understanding of famine especially stirred the imaginations of artists and writers. Eshetu Tiruneh’s Rehab yefetaw (Victims of famine) (Figure 4.2) portrays the exodus of famine-stricken Ethiopians. Where they aim to go is unclear in the image, but Eshetu skillfully details their plight. Men and women, old and young alike, march toward an anticipated life, but the prospect of relief seems blurred as the canvas does not convey to the viewer

Figure 4.2 Eshetu Tiruneh. Rehab Yefetaw. 1974. 90 × 133 cm. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the National Museum of Ethiopia.

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any trace of hope. With tattered clothes and withered bodies, the people walk aimlessly in a dusty, barren land. The horror and the anguish behind the figures suggests an intolerant landscape. There is no hint of green on the surface of the canvas. The land, too, seems to be frantically seeking out food; everything is dry and dingy and shriveled. Eshetu captures the shades of death. His visual motifs are carefully outlined to recount one cruel episode of human history. An untitled painting by Gebre Kristos Desta (Figure 4.3) is probably the most powerful image of the famine because of the way elements in the composition cohere and, most importantly, because it shows the political unfolding of the 1970s. Though the issue was heavily contested by the imperial regime, famine was truthfully apprehended after 1974—and who could have seized this historical moment better than Gebre Kristos Desta himself? Throughout his career, he had worked through questions surrounding the political, social, and economic freedom of citizens, and in this painting, he elicited the horrific conditions of hunger. In addition, he alluded to the prospect of forging a new life, different from the existence that was so fraught with oppression. Pigments curiously blur in selected features on his canvas, even as others stand out in sharp relief against indistinct imageries. In contrast to many of his other works, realistic and vexing images are scattered on the surface, and the juxtaposition of images—blurred and sharp—poignantly expresses the tragedies of people’s lives. Here, women and children are seen in ghostly and surreal depictions that evoke tropes of despair. In one image, a woman is holding an emaciated infant who is reaching out for a mother’s shriveled and emptied breast. Despite looking too weak to even stretch hands to the breast, the child optimistically attempts to suck the mother’s milk; the angularity of the child’s visage is too severe to fathom. In a graphic representation of the human condition resulting from hunger, Gebre Kristos presents images of bare bones that are impassively anticipating a better future in the shadow of death. Hope in the midst of hopelessness materializes when a spectacular eclipse illuminates a twilight that hovers over bodies that are mortified. It feels like a bright shimmer of light is attempting to rise. Distinctly different from Afework Tekle’s romanticized Mother Ethiopia—and contrary to the imagined monumental dignity given to the nation—Gebre Kristos’s work conveys a disturbing nationalist imagination that turns the nation into a terrifying space on the

Figure 4.3 Gebre Kristos Desta. Untitled. 1975. 80 × 200 cm. Oil on board.

Courtesy of the National Museum of Ethiopia.

verge of demise, a nation that has caused its citizens to endure such overwhelming privation. In 1984, Ethiopia was once again hit by famine. Causing over one million deaths, this famine led to one of the most illustrious alliances (and perhaps the first) between a disastrous aftermath and celebrity glamour. Live Aid, a concert organized by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise funds for Ethiopian famine relief, was attended by a hundred thousand people and broadcast on television to an estimated 1.9 billion around the world. The concert drew many eminent musicians and celebrities, and during this sixteen-hour marathon event, harrowing images of Ethiopian famine

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victims were repeatedly shown. Today, several decades later, the politics of its inscription has simultaneously reinforced stereotypes of African deprivation and poverty, on the one hand, and powerful images of Western aid, on the other—the African is inscribed as the helpless victim who eternally seeks and requires Western aid. Here, it is appropriate to recall Hannah Arendt’s criticism of Fanon’s statement that “hunger with dignity is preferable to bread eaten in slavery [emphasis mine],” which she described as one of Fanon’s “worst theoretical excesses.”11 “No history and no theory,” said Arendt, “is needed to refute this statement; the most superficial observer of the processes that go [on] in the human body knows its untruth.”12 Indeed, no precedent and no analogy can fathom the sentiments of people who are denied the most basic necessities of life. Of course, in no case should the hungry belly be refused what it rightfully deserves, but I would point out that Arendt was also the twentieth century’s most prominent critic of capitalism and its global hegemony, with which the politics of famine is inextricably connected. Ethiopia was still recuperating from the famine of 1973 when the Sahel’s annual rains dropped off in 1980–81. After the 1974 revolution and the junta’s appropriation of power, Ethiopia served as a surrogate for the contention between East and West. The battleground of the Cold War was in Africa, in countries such as Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia, where both the United States and the Soviet Union structured a covert East-West struggle fought by proxy. One consequence of this battle was armed conflict with several insurgent groups, which impacted Ethiopia’s cultivable territory. Moreover, the sharp decline in bilateral Western aid after 1977 deeply affected the country’s economy. In such a context, it is essential to understand that the broader political orientation of the aid industry is interwoven with global capitalist politics. The 1984 famine deconstructed whatever glory had remained in people’s nationalist imaginary. In an iconic Western media presentation that still lingers in popular memory in the West, Ethiopia was represented as a doomed land, and its symbolic currency as a nation was recontextualized and given new meaning. So formidable was the popular memory of the Ethiopian famine that the country and its citizens are still seen against the background textures of twentieth-century war and famine. Bekele Haile’s Ethiopia be Yekatit 66 (Ethiopia upon the uprising of 1974) (Figure 4.4) is an ironic portrayal of revolution and famine that outwardly depicts the revolution of 1974 in the midst of the 1984 famine. An

Figure 4.4 Bekele Haile. Ethiopia e Yekatit 66. 1984. 130 × 189 cm. Oil on can-

vas. Courtesy of the National Museum of Ethiopia.

astounding composition, the painting’s dominant images conjure apocalyptic fears and depict widespread catastrophe, rubble, unburied bodies, and bodies reduced to compost. Indeed, the painting’s physical and material affects of hunger move the viewer. Mouth wide open, a child who is painted in black sits on the ruins of Axum, screaming into the abyss. Another child is standing on the same ruins alongside the shrieking child, black flesh hanging, belly swollen, and bones protuberant; this child, too, looks despondent. One is reminded of Debebe Seifu’s interrogation in “KeAxum chaf akumada,” in which he troubled the notions of Axum’s mythical past, its elusive memory, and its reimagination and conflicting emotions. In Bekele Haile’s painting, Axum’s claims to exclusivity seem shattered, and its social memory is made obscure. National identity can seldom be imagined without its association to myths, and Axum’s mythical past appears to have gravely failed the nation as a whole. The piece provokes a most essential query: To what can the nation cling to insist on its own inimitability? The composition revolves around Yekatit 12’s Martyrs Square, a monument that memorializes Italian Fascist atrocities in which as many as thirty

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thousand people were killed following the attempted assassination of Italian viceroy Rodolfo Graziani. Yekatit 12 is equivalent to February 19 in the Gregorian calendar, and the month Yekatit is also symbolic of the February 1974 uprising. On the majestic background of the monument, which is the central figure in the painting’s arrangement, an armed revolutionary is shown fleeing the scene and heading toward Gondar, which the artist implies through the castle of King Fasiledes. His head is turned toward the two despondent children as he is dashing away from the scene. But his face seems simultaneously appalled and controlled. Appearing certain that he would vanquish the calamity that surrounded him, he looks strong and indomitable. In a visual exposé that is surreal, the viewer comprehends that the revolutionary is not fleeing from the repressed but is setting out toward a violent political struggle. Once again, Mother Ethiopia is depicted in the midst of genocidal misfortune, and once again, she is stretching one hand not to God but to her wasted children; in her other hand, she is holding a deceased child. “Whatever happened to the splendor I was told I had?” she seems to ask. “Where did the praises of the Bible,13 of Homer and Herodotus,14 of Rasselas and Prester John15 that had for centuries defined me all disappear?” The green, yellow, and red colors that in the past had supposedly identified and affirmed her brilliance are now wrapping the corpses and skulls of her progeny; their bodies have withered in the dishonor and indignity of hunger. It seems as if Otherness has subsequently become a perpetual part of Mother Ethiopia’s social imagination, and a different nationalist ideology that opposes the deceptions of the mythical past appears to have emerged. Esseye Gebremedhin’s depiction of Mother Ethiopia is also haunting (Figure 4.5). Ethiopia cries, her face anguished and tormented; she seems to be begging for mercy. The bones protrude in her long neck. Her face is unlike previous portrayals of Ethiopia by artists: Mother Ethiopia is usually painted with features like those of people from the northern part of the country. In fact, so typical are these renditions that Esseye’s Ethiopia seems like a deliberate reminder that Mother Ethiopia is also positioned on the periphery. Esseye’s Ethiopia has a flat nose, dark skin, and kinky hair. Despite her obvious grief, she is strikingly powerful. Through the agony of hunger, she is defiant. Through the reality of death, she looks animated. Not yet ready to die, she seems to be yearning for calm in the midst of discord. Figure 4.5 (opposite) Esseye Gebremedhin. Untitled. 1980. 80 × 60 cm. Oil on

plywood. Courtesy of the National Museum of Ethiopia.

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Stylistically, Esseye’s painting incorporates a realism that is combined with the grotesque. The skeletal bodies of Ethiopia and those around her stunningly portray the social realities of hunger. The contrasting concepts of hunger are painted beneath her, where well-fed and elegantly attired gentlemen are standing around plates of sumptuous food. Some are Europeans, and others are painted with black faces. Perhaps the artist is suggesting that dreams should continue even in the face of death. Amid the extreme conditions of trauma that were triggered by the two famines—in 1973 and 1984—Ethiopian artists portrayed themes of misery, and with an acute awareness and sensibility, they graphically addressed their historical and mythical pasts in a critical engagement, forging a drama of social protest. In a new nationalist imagination—an imagination so extreme that paintings exquisitely communicate to the viewer—Mother Ethiopia astoundingly changes. Artists wanted the viewer to witness and feel Mother Ethiopia’s pain. Having experienced such unbearable pain, it was necessary for her to forever alter her history, resisting explanation as to why the nation only served the few. Nonetheless, hope was a central theme in almost all the pieces. That a nobler day and a better future would ultimately ascend was seldom in doubt. The Derg’s Nationalism in the Midst of Tyranny

Following the uprising of 1974, the Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police, and Territorial Army—or the Derg (Committee)—was formed by military officers. Originally composed of 120 members, its ranks later decreased as members were killed or expelled. Shortly after it was formed, the Derg executed sixty of the emperor’s trusted officials and cabinet members and imprisoned many others who were associated with Haile Selassie’s regime. When the emperor died in August 1975 under mysterious circumstances, the monarchy was formally abolished. Mengistu Hailemariam became the chair of the Derg. In 1987, the Derg was formally dissolved, and the country became the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (PDRE). Mengistu Hailemariam became secretary-general of the Workers Party of Ethiopia, president of PDRE, and commander in chief of the armed forces. The psychological state of individuals and the broad philosophical consciousness of the nation were forever altered by the mass uprising of

Figure 4.6 Mengesha Seuym. Enamert. 1978. 100 × 125 cm. Woodcut. Courtesy

of the Alle School of Fine Art and Design.

1974, and what ensued no longer evoked the legendary tales of the Kebra Negast but a more complex history of nationalism that was primarily used, as Hannah Arendt once put it, to “feed the prejudices of the masses.”16 “Ethiopia Tekdem” (Ethiopia First) and “Enat Hager Weym Mot” (Revolutionary Motherland or Death) became the revolutionary slogans of the military junta (Figures 4.6 and 4.7). With an entirely new political framework and ideology, the nationalism was different in substance and significance from that of preceding regimes. An official nationalism that was informed by the revolutionary rhetoric of class and class consciousness, it was often manifested in extravagant and demagogic spectacles of state power. Public cultures in the form of signs and symbols that represented

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the ideology of the state flooded public squares. Billboards and posters in all the major squares of the city displayed images of Marx, Lenin, Engels, and Colonel Mengistu Hailemariam. Parades, performances, blue khaki uniforms for civil servants that were manufactured in North Korea and used as daily wear, national military service, and national student service in the countryside were among the many projects that were designed to flaunt the state’s authoritarian nationalism, in which propaganda and terror were freely interchanged. Much of the nationalist narrative concentrated on the war against Eritrean and Ogaden secessionist forces, in addition to insurgent groups that opposed the regime, such as the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party and, later in the 1980s, the All Ethiopian Socialist Movement (MEISON). Democracia and the Voice of the Masses, the publications of the EPRP and MEISON, respectively, were widely circulated. The Ethiopian Student Movement was largely responsible for the establishment of both the EPRP and MEISON, which joined the Derg during the early days but later had a falling out with the committee. The EPRP continued to work against the Derg and functioned as an underground armed movement until the early 1990s. Most of the killing and genocide of the era was directed against the EPRP, since it had mobilized the majority of the youth who worked in underground movements in the major cities of Ethiopia. The shared historical experience of the peasant became a symbolic nationalist reference that offered political prescriptions suitable to the Derg’s ideology. “Abyotu le Arsoaderu” (The Revolution Is for the Peasant) became a popular slogan, whereby the Derg promised to improve the condition of peasants, whom they described as the cause of the revolution. Certainly, the condition of the Ethiopian peasant was one of the fundamental issues behind the 1974 mass uprising. The Ethiopian Student Movement’s principal demand began in the fight against the exploitation of the peasant. In 1964, student demonstrations were held under the slogan “Land to the Tiller!” and this demand continued to be voiced through different forms of activism until the revolution of 1974. Andreas Eshete has argued that members of the Ethiopian Student Movement initially operated under the mistaken belief that the Figure 4.7 (opposite) Tsige Sheferaw. Untitled. 1978. 36 × 160 cm. Woodcut.

Courtesy of the Alle School of Fine Art and Design.

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nationalization and state control of economic allocation and distribution the Derg had implemented when it first seized power would generate economic growth and impartiality. Andreas asked: “How could peasants be expected to overcome poverty just because they are freed from obligations to landlords? Just how could their meager resources and their primitive technology spontaneously create the wealth necessary to launch an industrial economy?”17 Indeed, the state exploited the cause of the peasant to advance its own political project. Farmers now became subject to obligations to the state, whereas such duties had formerly been extracted by landlords. Peasants were also organized as militias and forced to fight the regime’s political opponents, as in the war against the secessionist movements in Eritrea and Ogaden and the underground Marxist-Leninist movement of the EPRP. The state would go on to celebrate the peasant even as it denatured the real politics behind the origin of the peasant question. The Derg was consumed with sustaining its monopoly of politics, and its nationalism was disturbingly impregnated with fear. Many became unreceptive to this form of imagined community. Nationalism in the Beginning Years of the Revolution

Visual artists, playwrights, literary intellectuals, musicians, and students were the first to be drawn to the promises of equality and justice, and during the initial few years of the military regime, many embraced the Derg’s political goals. Tadesse Mesfin, who taught at the Fine Art School during the Derg era, reminisced about the frequent social gatherings of colleagues and the enjoyable moments they spent in the early years of the regime.18 Tsegaye Gebremedhin’s drama Ha hu besedest wer (ABC in six months) (1974) narrated the destruction of the ancien régime and the ultimate certainty of the revolution, about which Tsegaye said in 1975: “Very progressive, Ha Hu Besedest Wer expressed peoples’ desire for change. It has been a year and a half since our revolution began and there is much achieved during this short period. But literature and poetry have not yet progressed.”19 To rectify this lapse, Tsegaye suggested that more artists should produce works that reflected the revolution’s experiences. But as the regime grew increasingly repressive, Tsegaye’s subsequent plays were censored, and plays such as Gamo were banned because of their stand against the ideology of the state.

In the beginning years and amid the jubilation of the revolution, artists produced works that referenced the ordinary lives of Ethiopians and especially captured the multiple faces of workers and peasants. As art critic and artist Esseye Gebremedhin stated, “Initially beautiful paintings of the ideals of the left were produced by artists.”20 For instance, an untitled work by Tebebe Dessie represents the sentiments of victory (Figure 4.8). On this canvas, a young soldier is marching with one fist clenched. His left leg is slightly bent and is positioned behind the right. He looks as if he is marching with fierce force. The other hand is holding a red Communist flag. The clenched fist is intriguingly disproportional to the rest of the soldier’s body, as if to deliberately show what a potent blow it could deliver. His face appears extremely angry and expresses various types of rage, effectively splitting what could otherwise be conceived of as one form of anger. Perhaps the expression on the face conveys to the viewer the condemnatory anger experienced during the first attack on an enemy, the anger of defeat, or even the resilience of pain. Created on a background that resembles a yellow field, the surface looks textured and uniquely captures the spirit of a war-torn landscape. And even if the color is opaque and the carvings on the wood agitated, the piece brilliantly depicts the early passions of the revolution. Another powerful expression that aptly represents the period is Abebe Kassaye’s graduation work (Figure 4.9). On a wood relief, a carefully carved fist is planting a wood inside the earth. The top of the stand is engraved with the hammer-and-sickle sign. The viewer is directly confronted with the large size of the fist and the sign that it so tightly grasps. Abebe’s piece also introduces the viewer to the visual landscape of the early revolution years. Since the 1960s, the Ethiopian Student Movement had sought to address urgent political questions under the aegis of scientific socialism. Likewise, the regime initially promised to protect the poor and disenfranchised under the same socialist auspices, and it won the support of the Ethiopian Left early on. However, “despite its evident attractions and its limited success in paving Ethiopia’s release from a pre-modern past,” said Andreas Eshete, “the commitment to socialism harbored varied costly illusions, illusions that are a legacy of scientific socialism.”21 Andreas contended the Ethiopian Left primarily believed that questions of political justice could be circumvented “if pride of place in policy and practice is accorded to

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the disenfranchised and dispossessed.”22 But Andreas also argued that no valuable public aim could justify the sacrifice and disabuse of democratic values and rights, a grave disillusionment that the Ethiopian Student Movement failed to anticipate. The dignity of equal and free citizenship was violently dishonored when the regime usurped the socialist cause, as Andreas noted, “to consolidate a tyranny that trampled on the rights and freedoms of citizens with military brutality.”23 As a result, a discriminatory universalism that confined Ethiopian history in a web of ambiguities eventually became the source and paradigm of progress and history. Only later was that historical memory erased and a new one reinscribed, with the state deploying different mechanisms to control that memory so as to enhance and legitimate its power. Later still, an absolutist and totalizing state-sanctioned ideology led to the slaughter of thousands of Ethiopian men and women activists, and many more were exiled thereafter. In time, modernism reflected the interiority of the subject and the enduring impact of an imported ideology. Given these developments, it is necessary to interrogate some of the fundamental notions by which the modernism of the period located and defined itself.

Figure 4.8 (opposite) Tebebe Dessie. Untitled. 1977. 110 × 60 cm. Woodcut. Courtesy of the Alle School of Fine Art and Design. Figure 4.9 Abebe Kassaye. Untitled. 1980. 119 × 213 cm. Woodcut. Courtesy of

the National Museum of Ethiopia.

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Contested Memories and the Challenges of Writing History (1979–91)

Artists’ selective and indiscriminate memories of the later period were complicated, particularly after the Red Terror, when all hopes for a sanguine future were literally abolished. Some artists did not want to acknowledge the extent of their involvement in the propaganda work required of them by the state; others sought to forget their own artistic interventions that circulated the state’s ideals, though few were actively engaged in such work. But for whatever reason, artists either did not want to talk about the later period or did not want their works to be directly referenced. The stigma attached to being associated with this period naturally raises significant problems for researchers, camouflaging the entire body of facts regarding artistic practices. Some artists chose to simply forget the regime even though they were closely connected with it. For instance, Abdelrahman Sheriff, who was the director of the Fine Art School during the entire period of the military junta, talked to me in 2009 about the importance of the “imagination to a work of art,”24 stressing that no one should impose “on the artist’s creative sovereignty.”25 In 1999, a mere eight years after the collapse of the military junta and the end of Abdelrahman’s seventeen-year tenure as director of the school, he remarked: When we look back at the situation in the last twenty years, we find that we have had a trial of a sort of dictatorship of culture and art during the socialist regime. One cannot really say much about any basic development in the arts during this period. With the fall of the Derg (the military junta) we have definitely left this era behind us. There is certainly a new situation in our country now. Artists who have been working under restrictive conditions in the last two decades, suddenly find themselves in a new and completely unexpected free situation. During the last five years of the newly found liberalization, young artists as well as the not so young ones, are feeling and living this freedom sometimes with a real joy of rebirth. One can do what one likes, and, of course, nobody has the right to interfere, even if one does something improper, whether knowingly or unknowingly.26

Abdelrahman’s promising experimentation with modernist expression had started out with several exhibitions after his return from Germany, but it was stopped short by political events that confined him to administrative tasks under a regime that denied critical perspectives on the scholarship of modernism. He returned to Ethiopia and worked as an instructor of art education and graphics at the Fine Art School. He had started his artistic career with abstract compositions that reflected and explored the layered background of his Ethiopian heritage. He drew inspiration from both Christian and Muslim expressions of that heritage, simultaneously affirming in his works the illuminated manuscripts and icons of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church as well as his experiences as a Harari Muslim. And similar to his contemporary and colleague Gebre Kristos Desta, he was influenced by the German Expressionists. How, then, did this type of background allow him to persevere in an authoritative and dictated environment? One important line of argument regarding Abdelrahman’s career relates to the shift from one stage to another that many other artists have awkwardly negotiated as well—that is, from styles such as German Expressionism to dictated aesthetic and today to the sovereignty of art. If one seeks to understand the particular constellation and essential characteristics from which Ethiopian modernism is derived and how it continues, perhaps Abdelrahman’s artistic course is a good starting point. Artists lived and worked during the seventeen-year stretch of the Derg regime, yet to date, neither their past artistic subjectivities nor their artistic practices have been questioned or examined. Abdelrahman has said that “the government rarely imposed on the artistic production of students”27 during his seventeen-year directorial tenure. But artists such as Geta Mekonnen, who was a student at the Fine Art School during the military regime, said the ideology of the state was indirectly imposed on artists and that graduation works were scrutinized by members of a committee chaired by Abdelrahman.28 These members authenticated the revolutionary characteristics of the pieces, at times rejecting works that were perceived to have questioned the revolution’s ideology. Tadesse Mesfin and Esseye Gebremedhin, who were instructors in the school during the same period, also remembered works that were rejected because they failed to represent the period; such works were called wektawi yalhone (not constitutive of the period).29 Both Abdelrahman Sheriff and Tadesse Mesfin were members of the Derg’s prominent propaganda organ,

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the Commission to Organize the Party of the Working People of Ethiopia (COPWE), and Tadesse Mesfin recalled having failed some of the graduation works because they were not wektawi. His candid memory was one of the very few that I came across in this project that genuinely accounted for the realities that surrounded the period’s artistic practices. Later in the revolution, when repression was at its height (1978–91), Tadesse Mesfin and Esseye Gebremedhin said they produced two kinds of works: official art that was imposed on them by the state and works that satisfied their own artistic desires and curiosities in their private studios.30 For instance, Esseye’s piece portraying the commitment of women to the revolution (Figure 4.10) reflected the official propaganda of the state. Made in 1979 immediately after the Red Terror, the work shows women marching in red-trimmed white dresses with red scarves tied around their heads. Spectators, some holding the Ethiopian flag and some holding the red Communist flag, are watching the parade. Communist flags are also hanging on adjacent walls and on the far horizon behind the parade. Immediately legible is the red hue that pervades the canvas. These types of works are officially archived in the National Museum of Ethiopia, but the whereabouts of most of the pieces that Esseye and Tadesse identified as private studio works are not available. These two men unambiguously described the two categories of works produced during the Derg period, but I am troubled by other artists’ indifferent reactions to the artistic practices of the period, particularly in works done in the latter days of the Derg. At that point, the regime no longer tolerated anything outside its direction, and artists—forced or otherwise—became political subjects. In the late 1970s, the Department of Ideology of COPWE began to publish several theoretical papers on the urgent and necessary relationship between art and ideology. For instance, in a section called “Creativity in Pre-revolutionary Ethiopia,” the publication stated, “In pre-revolutionary Ethiopia, art reflected the ideology of the feudo-bourgeois reactionary class. Even with art’s glorification of this particular class, the privilege given to art and artists by the feudo-bourgeois class was not satisfactory. Furthermore, this class was a big stumbling block that hindered the growth of the creative arts.”31 Parallel to this statement, Afework Tekle’s depiction of Mother Ethiopia drastically changed when in 1977 he was asked by the state, along with seven other artists, to work on a mural at Yegegnoch Amba (Center for the Heroes), a rehabilitation facility in Debre Zeit for those wounded

Figure 4.10 Esseye Gebremedhin. Women Marching. 1979. 60 × 80 cm. Oil on plywood. Courtesy of the National Museum of Ethiopia.

in the wars the Derg conducted on several fronts. Four sculptors and four painters participated; Afework Tekle, Bisrat Bekele, Alle Felege Selam, and Demissie Shiferaw were the painters, and Tadesse Belayneh, Bekele Abebe, Daniel Tuafe, and Kidane Belay were the sculptors. Afework’s share of the mural entitled The Victory of Ethiopia through Work, Productivity and Struggle (1977–79) is considered one of the classic paintings of the revolution. Heavily didactic, borderline kitsch, and propagandist, the painting is organized into three parts. The center is entitled Through Our United Efforts We Shall Protect the Unity and Territorial Integrity of Ethiopia, and this is where Mother Ethiopia rises. This time, Afework’s Mother Ethiopia is dressed in the Ethiopian kemis (dress), her hair is braided, and she stretches her hands not to God but to the ideals of scientific socialism. Red Communist flags and Ethiopian flags of green, yellow, and red embrace her from both the left and right sides. Behind her are the fierce insignia of nature: a thunderous sky,

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striking sparkles and glitters of sunshine, and a colorful mountain that meets a golden-brown dusk. The light that emanates from Mother Ethiopia is strikingly reflected on the ground, where some of her subjects, positioned below, seem awestruck. They are leaning backward to gaze up at her revolutionary might. They look as if they are from all walks of life: military personnel, farmers, an artist who is painting on an easel, and priests and monks. Whether Afework and the other artists of Yejegnoch Amba were coerced into doing this painting is not known, but The Victory of Ethiopia through Work, Productivity and Struggle was a banal political artifact that awkwardly reimagined socialist Ethiopia. When describing artists such as Afework Tekle, revolutionary cultural critic Aleme Eshete (1982) has stated: The fate of the celebrated artist of the pre-revolutionary days at first was a difficult one. They were attacked for their past works and they had to defend themselves and to catch up with the progress of the revolution. Afework Tekle, who was most affected in this respect, never gave up or set aside his brush. Instead, with the rare discipline and diligence that characterizes this internationally famous artist, he set out to create works that depict the revolution and the Ethiopia he loves. The result was rewarding and Afework whose huge three meter by five meter work, The Victory of Ethiopia through Work, Productivity and Struggle, now hangs in the Patriot Center in Debre Zeit, has regained his former enviable position.32 Statements like Aleme’s were propaganda designed to arouse other artists to follow Afework’s path. Afework Tekle—who preferred to be called by the title His Honorable, Maitre Artiste World Laureate—received the International Gold Mercury Award from Colonel Mengistu Hailemariam,33 and the colonel took dignitaries such as President Erik Honecker of East Germany to visit Afework’s exhibitions. In 1980, the artist gave one-man shows in the Soviet Union at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Russian State Museum in Leningrad. According to Richard Pankhurst, “These gatherings have re-asserted Afewerk’s position in the socialist world of art. He was awarded the highest order of hero of peace and friendship.”34 A much-celebrated artist during the regime of Emperor Haile Selassie, a man he venerated in several of his works,35 Afework Tekle resisted

revolutionary types of art in the early years of the Derg. But he became highly eminent in the latter years of the military’s rule. After the collapse of the Derg regime in 1991, however, he declined all interviews until shortly before his death, and even then, he was never asked about his work from that era. Nor did he volunteer to talk about it, even as he was actively engaged in producing works that glorified the state’s version of the revolution. Similarly, Tadesse Belayneh and other artists who participated in the Yegegnoch Amba project were hesitant to talk of their involvement in this propagandist enterprise.36 This consistency among the artists indicates just how ambiguous and problematic their relationships were to the official ideologies of art. In this, one is reminded of Hannah Arendt’s most influential work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1962), wherein she examined the Adolf Eichmann trial at Jerusalem in 1961. According to Eichmann, wrote Arendt, “under the then existing Nazi legal system he had not done anything wrong [and] what he was accused of were not crimes but ‘acts of state’ over which no other state has jurisdiction. . . . [He contended] that it had been his duty and that he had committed . . . no crimes.”37 I am not suggesting that crimes were committed by artists. Rather, I want to use Arendt’s insight as a metaphor to suggest that perhaps many artists did not fulfill the state’s expectations out of conviction but only did what they had to do, as if it was their obligation. Even Esseye Gebremedhin’s forthright memories about the period are curious when considered against a retrospective background of what the period’s academic deliberations provided. In the proceedings of the Yekinetebebat Seminar (Seminar on the Visual and Performing Arts), held in August 1981, Esseye said: The radical revolution that the people of Ethiopia steered also presented itself in the visual arts. Art works that were only seen by few prior to the revolution were suddenly displayed to the larger populace after the revolution. . . . Artists who had been dispersed are today, after the revolution, organized under the banner of “United Ethiopian Artists Organization” and have risen up to express peoples’ needs as if [they were] their own, to feel peoples’ problems as if [they were] their own and to struggle for people as if it was their own struggle. (Translation mine)38

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Prominent individuals from the areas of literature, visual arts, theater, music, and performance presented academic papers; among many others, the presenters included Mengistu Lemma, Tesfaye Lemma, Debebe Seifu, Fekade Azeze, Tesfaye Gessese, Hailu Araya, and Ayalneh Mulat. At the height of repression in 1981,39 almost all of the participants reflected on the impressive achievements of socialist Ethiopia and the possibilities that its future held. Could it be that artists and writers showed genuine ideological conviction in 1981 when the Derg was undeniably inhumane? Could it be that they were forced to engage in these presentations? Or could it be that they lacked an Arendtian notion of reflective thinking? Perhaps the repetitive irregularities were so interesting and perplexing that the artists and intellectuals were incapable of either blind obedience or critical thought but only an Arendtian representation of a “banal Eichmann.” To broadly characterize the artistic environment of the period, it is plausible to posit that subjects employed policies and embraced authoritarian thinking short of their own introspective thinking. Though it is extremely problematic to get an accurate depiction of artists’ intentions, practices, or beliefs, the epoch obviously shaped multiple interpretations in artistic production. Indeed, for many of us who were not directly involved with the history of the period, it has become fairly easy to condemn the artists’ silence as well as the inconsistent accounts they have given about their works from the period. But we will never be able to comprehend the time in its totality if we cease to interrogate the very reasons for the silences and irregularities, as I attempt to do in the course of this chapter. At the Seminar on the Visual and Performing Arts, Mengistu Lemma presented a paper entitled “Literature’s Direction in the Age of Transition.” He cited Article 1 of the military regime’s constitution, which stated: “In collaboration with anti-feudal and anti-imperialist forces, the successful formation of the People’s Republic of Ethiopia is contingent upon the transitional foundations of socialism.” Mengistu told participants that the focus of his paper was “the transition” (shegeger) that the constitution had specifically noted. Who would have imagined that Mengistu Lemma would speak in extraordinary superficiality about literature? He was known for his erudition and literary savvy, and he had an outstanding wit that was at times sinister and proverbial and at other times elegantly original—and always candid. Even the most reluctant reader becomes captivated by his animated words and voices of protest, deeply etched in the Ethiopian literary

imaginary. But Mengistu Lemma’s intervention only provokes additional perplexity about the complicated realities of the period. “When we transit from feudalism to capitalism and then to socialism,” he wrote in his paper, “the transition should not only be understood by the modern mind but also should consider the literatures of the period.”40 He insinuated that Ethiopia was still in transition to socialism, and in layers of Amharic metaphors, he suggested that it was disturbingly so without actually knowing what it was transiting from or what the transition’s ultimate outcome might be. He provoked writers to primarily understand the foundations of early Ethiopian literature and follow that up with an investigation of world literature. Further, he said, Ethiopians should subsequently study the experiences of a socialist country to finally understand the essential principles of socialist literature before contemplating notions of transition. Thus, he was suggesting that Ethiopians should know the layered histories that made transition necessary; it was as if he was urging them to understand the mistakes of past history before attempting to rectify history’s “unknown” errors. Like Mengistu Lemma, a few other individuals awkwardly challenged the totalizing ideology that was levied on them, though they may have feared repercussions. Bealu Girma, whom I discuss later in the text, was one such individual. Conversely, Seyum Wolde and Debebe Seifu were revolutionary writers who effortlessly manipulated the dexterity and beauty of the “Wax and Gold” to caution against threats to human rights, to subvert oppressive authority and its moral standards, and to champion the genuine freedom of citizens. Both of these men openly believed scientific socialism would effectively respond to the fundamental queries of freedom and justice, and they both firmly upheld the mutual attachment of art and ideology. Seyum was a graduate of Moscow State University, an art critic, an educator in the Fine Art School, and an art juror during the Derg regime. He said: Art which is always an integral part of any ideology had been influenced to serve the purpose of new change in all societies. Being under the influence of the Ethiopian revolution, the visual arts of present day Ethiopia are not far from this truth. Its role in social transformation is immense and effective. Therefore, the discussion concerning the ideological aspect of the study will be in the lesser degree than the administrative and management aspects of the art of the new era, for the latter determines the former.41

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Even though Seyum staunchly propagated the ideas behind scientific socialism, which many had begun to abhor, he was fondly remembered by many students for creating an art scene that was vibrant and participatory, and he was different in many of his ways and methods from other professors of the time. Furthermore, he was credited with having periodically gathered students to discuss the location of Ethiopian revolutionary art in relation to global artistic movements. A student in the Fine Art School during the Derg regime, Elizabeth Habte Wold, one of the few female contemporary artists who graduated in 1985, described Seyum Wolde as a professor who shaped her multiple conceptual and formal queries. Debebe Seifu and Seyum Wolde were among the few who honorably and relentlessly propagated the ideals of scientific socialism until their deaths. For many others, however, the paradox of scientific socialism was invoked in complicated forms. Furthermore, the unremitting successions of change and upheaval in the country had left an unsettled and inconclusive consciousness in citizens who lived through the period’s varied anxieties. It is not difficult to imagine that this ambivalence toward the regime’s unceasing imposition and withdrawal of ideas and policies may have legitimated the complex composition of artistic subjectivities. Culture in the Midst of Repression

As I have indicated elsewhere, while there is general agreement on the level of atrocities committed during this period in Ethiopia, little work has been done on the cultural history of the time. However, the human interactions in various situations in that era are ingrained in public consciousness primarily because of the novels, musical performances, and visual arts that were produced at that time. Such works provide evidence and records of the prevailing social attitudes, which are arguably crucial to fathom in order to fully comprehend the Derg’s historical interlude and, furthermore, to comprehensively understand the period’s cultural production. Music under Tyranny

The Department of Ideology of the Central Committee of COPWE stated the following in 1982:

Culture is a sum total of the material and spiritual heritage created and accumulated by man in the course of his social activities. Culture is the outcome of social practice and development. Culture too has two fundamental categories: material and spiritual. . . . Spiritual culture refers to social consciousness and all the products of mental labour. . . . It is the masses of the people who are the makers of culture. Socialist culture is made by the masses of the people and develops though the utilization of accumulated wealth of both spiritual and material culture which make up its basis. . . . It is impossible to develop proletarian culture by arising from the scratch or by neglecting the cultural heritages that have been accumulated through the ages.42 Within the larger cultural propaganda of the Derg, several interventions in music, literature, and theater emerged. As musicologist Semeneh Betre Yohannes has argued, music was one channel that burgeoned during the seventeen-year history of the Derg. Semeneh said: “Local musicians often refer to the 1980s as the ‘Golden Era of Ethiopian Music,’ in contrast to Western writers who have frequently failed to acknowledge the musical progress of this era.”43 For example, the formation of kinet, which were young performing groups organized by the Derg to broadcast the political programs of the state through music, left an unprecedented mark, developing future music talent. Colonel Mengistu Hailemariam said of kinet, “With the condition that has risen to encourage the arts, those cultural productions that the masses looked [at] from a [distance], particularly the production of music, are today able to easily reach the masses through the formation of musical teams organized in each region and each neighborhood.”44 Certainly, kinet made an impression on the youth, including Elizabeth Habte Wold. A passionate dancer even today, Elizabeth said she actively participated in her neighborhood’s organized kinet group in her formative years. Her graduation work, entitled Wehemia or ye Meskel wazema (Right before Meskel, the celebration of the cross) (Figure 4.11), is an excellent portrayal of the rhythmic vibrancy of forms. Perhaps the geometric human forms and the elaborate movements in space were responding to her direct interaction with kinet, although she reported she was passionately rhythmic

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Figure 4.11 Elizabeth Habtewold. Wehemia. 1985. 100 × 120 cm. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Alle School of Fine Art and Design.

even before her encounter with them. In any case, Wehemia presents an innate conversation and colloquy between dance and the visual arts. It incorporates the stylized movements of the body, as seen in much of her later work, and it gives the illusion that the artist is also dancing as she is making the art. Elizabeth’s animated take on dancing images continues to take shape in her contemporary work. She has positioned women’s creativity by privileging vision away from the male gaze. Appropriating and freely incorporating elements surrounding dance, she captures the motion of the body from a female perspective. Perhaps her involvement with kinet contributed to the character of her present works. According to musician Yohannes Petros, the principle behind kinet was “integration, incorporation, and synthesis of Ethiopian cultural heritage with Marxism-Leninism.”45 Kinetoch, as they were called, were rigorously trained by savant musicians such as Awlachew Dejene, who founded the Fasiledes Kinet in 1976; Kelemework Debebe, who established the Wollo Bahil Amba Kinet around the same time; and Iuyel Yohannes, who was the trainer and founder of Gish Abay Kinet in 1977. Semeneh noted that, “beyond the advancement of traditional and neo-traditional music, kinet offered a significant contribution to Ethiopian contemporary music.”46 He

also argued that despite the prevalent belief that azmari houses proliferated after the Derg, they instead thrived around 1977 in the Kazanchis area of Addis Ababa. The first azmari house is believed to have been started by the prominent singer Rahel Yohannes. At the beginning of the 1980s, the number of registered members of the azmari house association in Kazanchis was thirty. These houses were also called zigubign (close after me), since people came in to dance and sing with the azmaris before the 11:00 p.m. curfew and did not leave until dawn. Experimental bands were also formed, such as Roha, whose members previously played in well-known bands. They initially featured vocalists such as Kuku Sebsbe and Livon Fondachi and later had other prominent vocalists such as Tilahun Gessese, Mahmud Ahmed, Muluken Melesse, Bizunesh Bekele, and Tsehaye Yohannes. Semeneh said that Roha Band produced about 250 recordings on audiocassette, and it was the force behind the boost in audiocassette sales, which increased from 1,000 copies in 1975 to 100,000 in the late 1970s. Even when the Derg appeared more repressive in the late 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, the aversion to its violence did not escape the experiences of everyday life. Literature and Particularly Oromay

Though Ye Key Kokeb Zemecha (the Red Star Campaign)47 ultimately became a proclamation of war against Eritrean insurgents, it was initially designed as a cultural awareness event to mobilize the people of Eritrea against rebels who wanted to secede from Ethiopia. Musicians, playwrights, and literary intellectuals attended the launch of the campaign along with the party chair, Colonel Mengistu Hailemariam, and high-ranking Derg officials. Bealu Girma’s iconic novel Oromay (1983),48 a word that means “it is over” in Tigrinya, intimately represented the passion of love, the beauty of language, humor, and emotional conflict, as well as revolution and disillusionment. Based on the story of the campaign against Eritrean insurgents in Nakfa, Eritrea, Oromay poignantly situated the images of the time: the heroes and the villains, the dreams deferred, the forgotten values, the betrayals, the tragedies and ecstasies of love, and the deceptions of revolution. In the novel, just as in reality, Mengistu Hailemariam and his most important officials attended the campaign launch. Oromay vividly portrayed the humanism of a politicized society, brilliantly introducing the reader to nationalism, fantasy, vanity, love, lust, danger, and delusion.

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Bealu ended the novel with this statement: “He heard the gun shots at Nakfa. Listening to the bloody screams of heroes, his heart went to the battleground. You love everything and in the end, you lose everything. C’est la vie, Oromay.”49 Conveying the absurdity and futility of the Derg’s political project, the last phrase, “C’est la vie, Oromay” (Such is life, it is over), signified or sought the end of oppression. The book consequently defined the realities of a nation’s emotions and its remarkable humanist perseverance amid tension and violence, broadly indexing existing desires while simultaneously exposing the relationship between citizens and power. Unfortunately, Bealu Girma disappeared seven months after Oromay was written, and it is widely presumed that he was killed by the Derg’s security forces. He left home on an early evening in February 1984 and has never been seen or heard from again. It is said that officials were greatly angered by the book and that Bealu was dismissed from his position in the Ministry of Information for “betraying the revolution.” Writings about the Derg are consumed with blind partisanship that mostly conceives the havoc and misery of the period. Yet the abyss was also very much about the textures of everyday life. And it is precisely this life that is so often absent, that was lived, even under conditions of tyranny. Particularly obtrusive in novels based on the period and written by Ethiopians living in the diaspora—for example, Maaza Mengiste’s Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (2011), Dinaw Mengistu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), and Nega Mezlekia’s Notes from the Hyena’s Belly (2002 )—the images of war, repression, and terror are so vivid and so much in the forefront that the stories of all the people who desperately hoped, desired, laughed, and gave birth to beautiful babies with the same certainties as the rest of the human race are completely ignored. Their multilayered histories and experiences are packaged into one central rendition of doom and despair. And precisely because of this, it is important to make a conceptual distinction between the burdens of deprivation and tyranny and the necessary rhythms of beings—the kinds of social relations and conceptions of a people that endured through the period and laid the foundation for the eventual liberation from tyranny. Novels such as Oromay are artifacts that are seldom considered to be significant historical and cultural accounts of the period. Such works are appreciated exclusively for their literary merit, and the social histories that pervade them are often neglected. Nonetheless, these documents are immensely valuable in imaging the daily lives of ordinary people and how

they evolved, particularly during a period in which a majority of the accounts emphasized the grisly effects of terror on human lives, more than the stories of those who dreamed of escaping the terror. But such dreams are a constant, even through the atrocities of war. Monuments as Propaganda Sites

Only a few monuments were erected during the Derg regime, and except for a small number that still exist, most were removed when the EPRDF took power in 1991. Probably because there were not many sculptors in the country, monuments did not do much to promote the values of the revolution. The few sculptors who were in Ethiopia during the Derg included Tadesse Mamecha, Tadesse Belayneh, Tadesse Gizaw, Bekele Abebe, Bekele Mekonnen, and Alemayehu Bizuneh. Two of Tadesse Mamecha’s works still stand today. His concrete sculpture called Nikate an Afar (Consciousness [presumably the revolutionary consciousness of the ethnic group Afar]) is a replica of his 1971 graduation work at the Leningrad Art Academy and is currently located by the National Theater in Addis Ababa. Constructed in cement, it is a Greek classic that depicts a boy holding a stick. The second sculpture worthy of significant deliberation is Tiglachen (Our struggle), which stands in Addis Ababa’s city center. Erected for the tenth anniversary of the Derg’s assumption of power and during the 1984 famine, it was designed by Tadesse Mamecha and fabricated in North Korea. In attendance for its inauguration on September 12, 1984, were various representatives from the Communist bloc countries, in addition to Comrade Konstantin Cherenko, the eneral sercretary of the Central Party of the Soviet Union. Currently a memorial to Ethiopian and Cuban soldiers who were killed in the Ogaden war,50 Tiglachen covers 30,000 square meters. The monument is composed of three parts, with a middle pillar that is 50 meters tall and has a star mounted at the very top. A replica of the Hero’s Medal, measuring 2.7 meters in diameter and weighing 700 kilograms, stands at 30 meters. In front of the column sits a 20-ton relief depicting all those who fought for the defense and unity of the country. The central portion shows the hammer and sickle in addition to three armed people (two men and a woman). Sitting on a pedestal, an inscription reads, in Amharic, “The actions of the heroes who fell in the struggle for life and respect for our homeland and our revolution are immortal.”

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The left relief represents the revolutionary process, with Comrade Mengistu Hailemariam in military uniform leading a procession. The right side depicts Emperor Haile Selassie on horseback, seemingly oblivious to the plight of the hungry. Moving to the left side of the same relief, protestors are seen holding an English inscription, “Down with Imperialism.” Some are also overturning the throne, which symbolizes those who had ruled the country for centuries. A scene of liberation also appears, and further to the left are two frescoes and portraits of Cuban soldiers. A monument that attempts to erase past memories to re-create the new, Tiglachen marks the political legacies of the revolution. Revolution and the Theories of Socialist Realism

Perhaps what was most disturbing was the state’s attempt to replicate the politics and language of Socialist Realism in its endeavor to consolidate its tyrannical power. In 1982, COPWE elucidated the principles of Socialist Realism. In an article called “The Evolution of a Socialist Educational System in Ethiopia,” the ideologues of COPWE stated: The following are some of the major principles of socialist realism: 1) completeness in the reflection of reality, 2) firm partisanship and stands for the interests of the working people, 3) that is not a photo-copy of life but a truly creative principle based on living truth, appealing to the intellect and the senses and having great beauty and depth both in form and content, 4) objectivity in the interpretation of the various facets of life by reflecting not only the terrible and tragic or the pleasant aspects of life in isolation but by depicting all facets of life vividly and thus creating an impetus for the development and change, 5) molding the spiritual life of the working people by inspiring them for dedication to work raising productivity, developing patriotism, proletarian internationalism, communist morality etc., 6) heralding the hope of a bright future, serving the people etc.51 Socialist Realism, an ideology enforced by the Soviet state as the official standard for art, abstrusely defined the production of art in the country. “Socialist realism,” said COPWE, “essentially forms the guiding principles

of art.”52 Art critic Seyum Wolde believed in the interwoven relationship between art and socialist ideology, but the extent to which artists propagated the association between the two and incorporated ideas about Socialist Realism in their practices is debatable. Esseye Gebremedhin spoke for other artists like himself when he said, “It was the socialism that Ethiopia generated that artists produced and not socialist realist art.”53 The broad ideology of Marxist aesthetics and its critical theory for the dialectic of twentieth-century social forms itself takes divergent hermeneutics in Marxist aesthetic philosophy, and nowhere in COPWE’s literature was this ever considered. Marxist interpretation on aesthetics is fluid, and it is in this regard that theorists such as first Theodor Adorno, Georg Lukacs, and Bertholt Brecht have given differing interpretations. “The legacy of Western Marxism,” said Terry Eagleton, “from Lukacs to Adorno allots to art a theoretical privilege surprising at first glance for a materialist current of thought.”54 The relation of the worker to the object of labor is a central theme of Marxist philosophy. In Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx described work as man’s essential activity, not only to satisfy man’s needs but also to change the world. And one way to change the world was through the creative process. Marx considered art the highest form of activity for man and stated: “Man therefore also forms things in accordance with the laws of beauty.”55 For Marx, a fuller and higher freedom is attained when man does not have to fulfill material needs and when economics becomes just an end in itself. Economic work, therefore, is on a continuum with free artistic creation. The attainment of higher awareness through art had a conflicting interpretation even among Marxism’s early followers—for instance, between the 1920s’ Russian avant-garde called the Constructivists and the 1930s’ Stalinists called the Socialist Realists. In The Total Art of Stalinism (2003),56 Boris Groys wrote that earlier Soviet avant-garde movements such as Suprematism and Futurism paved the way for Constructivism and later Socialist Realism, in which components of utopian life dominated the ideological paradigm. The new generation of Constructivist artists were engineers, agitators, and construction workers. They rejected artistic inspirations and believed that they should only make processes and constructs. Groys has argued that the Constructivists nevertheless inspired an avant-gardism that was contrary to Socialist Realism, which advocated the utilization of art to a didactic political effect. The full emergence of Socialist Realism signified the demise of avant-gardism as a philosophical and aesthetic system.

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It is fair to say that although the state pontificated about Socialist Realism, it was only the ideologues of COPWE and, to a certain extent, Seyum Wolde who attempted to articulate the function of revolutionary art. Even then, the critical understanding of an otherwise broad and divergent subject matter in Marxist aesthetic and Socialist Realism was rarely contemplated. Clearly, the “revolutionary democracy” of the state professed Soviet-type “scientific socialism” as its ideology and propagated revolutionary art vis-àvis Soviet-style socialism. Many artists were also sent to the Soviet Union for further education, in hopes that they would come back equipped with the acumen of Socialist Realist art. And today, 80 percent of the faculty of the School of Fine Art and Design is composed of these former students, who are now professors of painting, graphic design, etching, silkscreen, and woodcut. Consistent with COPWE’s aesthetic ideology, cultural critics at the time, such as Aleme Eshete, also suggested concrete approaches to creativity that depicted the revolution. Aleme said, “The masses of peasants and workers were alien to most of our artists. With the outbreak of the revolution, the struggle to introduce its ideals into the fine arts was long and lively.” Despite Aleme’s proclamation about artists who indulged in the causes of the masses, many artists from the period have said they had no ideological leaning. Even Tadesse Mesfin, who was a member of COPWE, said he was asked to join that group by party officials and became a member out of fear of repercussions if he refused. It is also crucial to note that theorists such as Aleme lacked the breadth of intellectual thought to subordinate the ideology to the political questions it was intended to address. And in the late 1970s, the Left’s infatuation with the revolution had significantly subsided, given the sheer cruelty of the regime. Meanwhile, the EPRP’s underground armed movement against the state had intensified. Thousands were slaughtered in the violent political campaign of the Red Terror and the bloody Stalinist purges of so-called reactionaries such as the EPRP. But even if discussions of socialist art and artistic practice were far from prevalent in the public sphere, the ideologues of COPWE persistently and extensively wrote about the intimate connection between art and ideology. Fears born of uncertainty were widespread among cultural producers because of indiscriminate and authoritarian directives against freedom of expression. It is against this diverse backdrop that the visual arts of the era should be examined.

The Fine Art School and the Visual Arts of the Period Graduating Students’ Works: Socialist Realism?

As indicated elsewhere, whether there were artworks that officially critiqued the state’s ideology is not known, although artists from the period have informed me that such works existed. Indeed, a full appreciation of the period’s artistic sentiments might have been possible if these works were found. But equally revealing are the artworks produced by students of the Fine Art School, a site where private and public political tensions, concerns, and sentiments coalesced to become manifest in visual articulations. Furthermore, some of the students who were products of the period, including Mezgebu Tessema, Getahun Assefa, Abebe Kassaye, Getachew Yoseph, and Melaku Ayele, were sent to the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries for further training after graduating from the Fine Art School. Because they are currently instructors at the school, it is also important to comprehend how their training and experience has affected students of postsocialist art. Current Professors—Former Students of the Fine Art School

Geta Mekonnen, who attended the Slade School at the University College in London (1986–88) after graduating from the Fine Art School in 1986, is one of the few students from the period who received his education from a Western institution. He recalled that “with the downfall of the Derg, artists were finally free from explicit influence and control, free to explore their individual tendencies and directions.”57 At the time of this writing, vestiges of that period still linger where contemporary art struggles between the types of guidance given to students at the Fine Art School and an artistic identity that is striving to break free of those fetters. This is primarily because student artists are still taught by a generation of teachers who were trained in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in specific genres of art, such as figures and images of the realistic type. The paradox is that most artists were sent to the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries for further education in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when the Soviet nation witnessed the production of shrewdly critical works and the Brezhnev regime had relaxed the constraints of Socialist Realism. Ironically, too, Soviet artists had started to snub the philosophies behind Socialist Realist art by the time the ideologues of COPWE widely circulated the principles of that art in the late seventies and eighties. Although

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subversive and underground movements flourished in the Soviet Union in these decades, the two institutions where many Ethiopians studied—the Ilya Repin St. Petersburg Academic Institute of Fine Arts of Sculpture and Architecture (the Leningrad School) and the Moscow State Institute of Fine Arts—nurtured a style that was traditionally academic or realistic.58 Those educated at the Leningrad School included Tadesse Mamecha (1943–2000), who became a professor of sculpture; Tadesse Belayneh, who is currently a professor of sculpture; and Tadesse Mesfin and Mezgebu Tessema, who are professors of painting. Bekele Mekonnen and Getahun Assefa, who are professors of sculpture and painting, respectively, were educated at the Moscow State Institute of Fine Arts. Except for Tadesse Belayneh and Tadesse Mamecha, who graduated from the Leningrad School in 1968 and 1970, respectively, all were in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Consequently, these artists’ training concentrated on “technically perfect” realistic works. It is perplexing, however, that most artists seem to have been unaware of the Soviet underground artistic movements of the time. Instead, they simply adopted and employed what the two schools bequeathed. Bekele Mekonnen, one of the few artists who did know about such movements, said that even though he was aware of the movements, nonofficial art and the spaces where it was produced and exhibited were not easily accessible.59 Tadesse Mamecha and Tadesse Belayneh, who were the early graduates of the Leningrad School, returned to Ethiopia to teach sculpture at the Fine Art School in 1969 and 1971, respectively, whereas Tadesse Mesfin and Eshetu Tiruneh returned in 1984 and 1985. Mezgebu Tessema, Bekele Mekonnen, Getahun Assefa, and others followed later. Eshetu, who graduated in painting from Moscow State Institute of Fine Arts and taught in the Fine Art School for a brief period after returning from the Soviet Union, has founded his own art school in Addis Ababa. Getachew Yoseph, who currently teaches printmaking, returned to Ethiopia from the Leipzig Academy of Graphic Arts in East Germany, as did Melaku Ayele, who teaches drawing. Thus, artists returned home from the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries to teach the traditionally academic and realistic art of their own training. Student Artists and Their Response to the State’s Ideology

Not all student artists were sent to the Soviet Union for further education, despite the abundance of scholarship opportunities there and in the Eastern

bloc countries. In fact, many students stayed behind, though some were lucky enough to emigrate to Europe and North America as political exiles. The government was also sending its youth to places such as the Ogaden, Eritrea, or Tigray, where it was waging war against insurgents, and it was then that a mass exodus of young political refugees to Europe and North America ensued. The artist Kebedech Tekleab, among others, walked to the Somali border in hopes of getting to the West, but unfortunately, she was apprehended while crossing the border and imprisoned. But even as artists showed significant apprehension in regard to the ideology that was imposed on them and even as artists fled the country to avoid persecution, the Fine Art School continued to promote scientific socialism’s philosophy of values until the downfall of the regime in 1991. In the following sections, I look at students’ works exclusively, to understand the kinds of artwork that were produced during that era. Many student artists mistrusted the teleological framework of the Derg’s version of Ethiopian history, the determination of its ideology, and the politically immaterial mandates that it imposed. Students resorted to employing subjects and images that generally examined the recurrence of myth in past history, or their works were occupied with socialist ideology’s superficial realisms. With recurrent themes and plots, artworks deceived the state by simulating its ideals while simultaneously sabotaging its most important paradigms. The works may not have measured up to the ideals of high modernism, but they nonetheless subverted the state’s propaganda essentials through simulacra and pretense that undermined authority. The intensity of these works stems from the tension between fantasy and reality, presence and absence, silence and upheaval. Similar to Bealu’s Oromay, as well as the musical interventions of kinet or zegubign (close after me), visual art also served as a relief or reprieve, allowing artists and audiences to vent the anger, to dull the pain, and, in a metaphysical irony, to hope, dream, and desire. In this way, although Ethiopian art during this period may not have been novel in its assumptions, it was nevertheless avant-garde in its outcome. “Seyum Wolde’s fundamental principles of socialist realism,” said Geta Mekonnen, “were applied in the Fine Art School. Rules and guidelines were issued regarding the training of art students as well as strict procedures to direct the production of graduation works by final year students.”60 “Today,” Seyum observed, “the world is divided into two ideologies. The dominant ideology is Marxism. Its concept of appropriation is distinct.

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Marxist aesthetic believes that creativity is based on the laws of nature. Marxism believes creativity has a large impact on human lives. The school of Marxist theory believes that the centrality to creativity is to know the realities of the world and reflect that reality.”61 Seyum’s official standard of art was, however, ignored by many students. Instead, the majority of artistic production in the school had a creative edge that hinged on the vernacular and that validated shared sensibilities. Many student artists engaged in works involving what Geta called “ambiguous Figure 4.12 Haregwa Zeru. Addis Ababa. 1987. 182 × 154 cm. Gouache on board. Courtesy of the Alle School of Fine Art and Design.

Figure 4.13 Daniel Taye. Ferd. 1989. 170 × 120 cm. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Alle School of Fine Art and Design.

subject matters that were preferred by many conscientious yet cautious students.”62 Hence, in a work entitled Addis Ababa, Haregwa Zeru painted Taytu and Menelik with a juxtaposed image of the modern city (Figure 4.12). Daniel Taye’s work Ferd (Figure 4.13) represents Emperor Tewodros,63 and Felege Selam Demissie’s Kalkidan depicts Emperor Yohannes (Figure 4.14). Leoul Sahle Mariam’s woodcut work portrays the heroic figure of Beshah Haile, who was a patriot during the Fascist occupation (Figure 4.15). Perhaps the most striking work in both technique and subject is Samuel Sharew’s Dil Ke Bahr Mado (Victory Overseas) (Figure 4.16). Samuel painted the hero Zeray Deres, who is popularly known for his public opposition to fascism. Although Zeray is identified by many Ethiopians as one of the thousands of soldiers from Italy’s African colonies, Ethiopianist historian Alessandro Triulzi wrote that Zeray was an Eritrean who went to Italy to study and work. According to Triulzi, “Zeray Deres was a young Catholic convert who had studied at one of the Italian schools in the colony. He spoke fluent Italian and had been assigned by the Ministry of the Colonies to act as interpreter for the Ethiopian notables who had been interned in Italy.”64

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Figure 4.14 (opposite top) Felege Selam Demissie. Kalkidan. 1987. 100 × 130 cm. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Alle School of Fine Art and Design. Figure 4.15 (opposite bottom) Leoul Sahle Mariam. Beshah Haile. 1987. 168 × 110 cm. Woodcut. Courtesy of the Alle of Fine Art and Design. Figure 4.16 (above) Samuel Sharew. Dil ke bahr mado. 1987. 138 × 116 cm. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Alle School of Fine Art and Design.

Zeray Deres, who in the Ethiopian imaginary is also thought to have killed Fascist soldiers during a celebratory parade attended by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and King Victor Emmanuel III, was, according to Triulzi, arrested in Rome in 1938 and accused of using “insulting words about Italy and the Duce, praising the Negus (the Emperor) instead.”65 He had also allegedly injured “several passers-by in a sudden fit of anger at the sight

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of the marble Lion of Judah monument in Rome’s Piazza dei Cinquecento.”66 The symbol of the Lion of Judah had been misappropriated by the Italians after the occupation. Triulzi said Zeray’s actions and anger “were simply attributed to the sick mind of a madman, and Zeray was sent to the psychiatric ward of a Sicilian prison, where he remained until his death in July 1945.”67 Samuel Sharew’s Dil ke bahir mado is a brilliant painting that depicts this mythical hero. Zeray stands tall and handsome. He is chained, yet he walks like a free man: the chains do not reduce him as he moves, lean and straight, even through the penal savagery imposed on him. He is dressed in white ije tebab (traditional attire). So meticulously wrapped, looking as if it is there to ward off the fear of death, the netela that is traditionally worn for celebratory events is tied around his waist. His hardy, muscular legs are bare, and they are touching what looks like a wet and mystical floor. Zeray’s face is not marked with vengeance, nor does it look desperate. And by no stretch of the imagination does he look like a criminal. He had broken a law he had never known existed. Who would have imagined that preserving the fundamental dignity of a nation and its citizens was a crime? White Fascist soldiers flank him on the left and the right. A white priest dressed in a red robe is looking at him as he strides past. The background looks treacherous, although a gleam of light from across the horizon reflects on his angular and penetrating features. The artist deliberately dichotomizes Zeray’s portrayal and that of his indicters through the play of shadow and light. Painted in shades of blue that fade within, the canvas also shows a setting sun that looks misty and cold except for the distant light that reflects on the prisoner’s face, leaving a glow. A close reading of the scene and images shows somberness, as the play of colors exposes brutality and courage all at once. Samuel’s Dil Ke Bahir Mado represents the barbaric atrocities of fascism, its social despair, and the resilient will of a people standing against its cruelty. Such nostalgic paintings dominate the archives of the School of Fine Art and Design. Geta wrote that artists were prevented from doing experimental works. He recalled a list of criteria and suitable subject matter that was imposed on the artists, which he said severely curtailed creativity. Students were required to work only from the list, and choices from the top of this list were encouraged. The list follows:

1. Glorification of the proletarian struggle and its achievements, 2. Patriotism and heroes of the revolution, and the military defending the motherland, 3. Socialist farmers engaged in communal work, the equality of women and women at work or as mothers, 4. Humanity defined by work and depictions of people at work, 5. Historical heroes and martyrs of the people in anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggle, and 6. Depiction of cultural festivities and the cultural life of marginalized societies and ethnic groups.68 Although there were several sanctions on the types of art that could be produced, the category of “historical heroes and martyrs of the people in anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggle,” which encompassed figures such as Menelik, Tewodros, and Empress Taytu, dominated the themes of artistic production. Some student artists also chose to indulge in themes of the countryside, creating serene depictions of farmland and fishing. In choosing these types of themes, the artists portrayed the fundamental misconception of the state’s nationalist ideology and its interpretation of history in a way that was overly absorbed in the present and that erased, reinscribed, and diverted a very long history. These works communicated with the larger public. Their formulaic depictions of identifiable figures such as Zeray Deres and Emperors Tewodros and Menelik and their routine plots such as the Battle of Adwa, as well as recurring portrayals of workers and peasants, were all easily absorbed by viewers. The artist as cynical humanist developed the technique of serial dedication. The regime wanted artists to portray its professed ideals, but artists who were disillusioned with the regime produced works that were repetitive, monotonous, and melancholic. Mainly paintings on canvas, these artworks exploited stereotypes, legible patterns, and other easily recognizable forms. The images narrated the history of tyranny through kings and queens, through workers and peasants, through portraits of past valor, and through visions of grandeur and might. Behailu Bezabih, who was a student during the Derg, told me: “This was the safest way where artists got out from

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imposed restrictions by the State. Working on martyrs and heroes satisfied the regime while keeping intact the integrity of the artist who feared capitulation to an ideology that the artist did not believe in.”69 The artwork was unassuming, with images and ideas that were not too complex and that routinely evoked an emotional response. The school allowed these images that represented the past because they symbolized unity and nationhood. Most works were nostalgic for a sense of place and time and referred to a range of emotions. Of course, nostalgia does not necessarily connote an absolute state of sadness or depression, in which one exclusively longs for a romanticized past; it can also signify an aesthetic emotion that comes from a particular context. In the students’ artistic productions between 1974 and 1991, nostalgia was a form of ripe emotion, and its reflection in art calmed the artists’ troubled souls. The images were visual narratives of protest and subtly fueled the political will and imagination of resistance. Artists built a vocabulary parallel to the official discourse of the state. In his essay entitled “The Aesthetics of Vulgarity,”70 African postcolonial studies theorist Achille Mbembe examined the banality of power in the postcolony and argued that the relationship between authority and subject was “convivial,” meaning that the relationship was brought about by having to live in the same space. The subject found refuge from what Mbembe called commandment by playing with and manipulating images of power.71 Many artists parodied power by simultaneously contesting and acknowledging its encumbrance. As Mbembe put it, individuals “kidnap power and force it as if by accident to examine its own vulgarity.”72 One could analyze in an Mbembean fashion the ways in which the Ethiopian artist-subject manipulated power, reproducing its epistemology and at the same time revealing its banality through simulacra and pretense. What I would underscore here, however, is the pure sensuality of artists’ works. Although responding to an epoch in crisis, they created works that capitulated to rather than challenged the conundrums of the time. A false consciousness that was nostalgic but lacked emancipatory potential had materialized, and it failed to represent the era in its entirety. Analyzing visuality outside hegemonic Eurocentric themes, my interrogation of these images is informed by the particular historical duress and its social and psychological consequences. Furthermore, this effort brings into question the perceptual and cognitive experience of aesthetics

in a tradition engaged with loftiness. Certainly, unlike what is called lofty art—which requires work from the audience and struggles with ambivalent feelings, these works encouraged their audience to participate. They were far from what the Western canon considers haughty, that element of art that is supposedly soaring and that only a few can comprehend. Talking about Walter Benjamin’s thought within the aestheticization of politics in the wake of fascism, Susan Buck-Morss (1992) noted, “If we were really to ‘politicize art’ in the radical way [Benjamin] is suggesting, art would cease to be art as we know it. Moreover, the key term ‘aesthetics’ would shift its meaning one hundred and eighty degrees. ‘Aesthetics’ would be transformed, indeed redeemed, so that, ironically or dialectically it would describe the field in which the antidote to fascism is deployed as a political response.”73 Buck-Morss argued that if the concept of interpreting aesthetics as a political response was allowed to develop, it would change the entire conceptual order of modernity. Indeed, the history of Western art, along with the art market and cultural institutions, has not accounted for a materialist art historical practice that potentially elucidates the domain of art as well as all other social phenomena. Instead, canonical theories of pleasure, with conventional hierarchies of value that disguise multiple histories and that privilege a few, prevail as hegemonic discourses. I am therefore bringing forth for contemplation the conceptualization of aesthetics that sanctions the dominance of one form of sensibility over another. Furthermore, I am most interested in aesthetics as a political response. It is true that Ethiopian art during this period doctored itself in an imaginary landscape to attain relief from its surrounding. My argument is that art needed this type of expression as a form of resistance, even as the critical gaze of the present—that potential of the image that could have salvaged the human experience—was romantically searching for a past that it could not redeem. Exhibition Spaces

It is significant that many artists at that time entirely withdrew from exhibiting or even producing experimental works. Moreover, only a limited number of veteran artists produced and exhibited nonpolitical works such as portraits and landscapes. Esseye Gebremedhin stated that “artists like Zerihun Yetimgeta produced works that were sophisticated and technically

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flawless and works that were bought by private collectors.”74 It is important to understand the period’s broader exhibition forms and spaces of production in order to evaluate the roles and limits of mediation—in other words, to explore how veteran artists’ works were exhibited, produced, and distributed. Established artists such as Tebebe Terfa, Worku Goshu, Teshome Bekele, and Zerihun Yetimgeta exhibited their works in the major cultural institutions of the country, such as the German Cultural Center, the Alliance Française, and the Italian Cultural Institution. However, as noted, many other artists abstained from exhibiting or even producing artwork at all. Bekele Mekonnen told me that “artists did not want to confine their works to limited artistic idioms after leaving the Fine Art School and chose not to exhibit in the few available venues.”75 In addition, they feared repercussions if they indulged in experimental works that truly depicted their lived experiences. It was the veteran artists who widely exhibited their works—and in artistic languages, such as landscapes and portraits, that did not intimidate the political status quo. For example, Teshome Bekele focused on the region of Harar and its people and landscape, whereas Worku Goshu concentrated on religious themes. The state did not tamper with their work, nor did it impose its artistic ideals; officials may have thought it prudent to leave the artists’ long tenure untouched. Herwig Kempf, who was the director of the Goethe Institute during the Derg, pointed out that there were a few powerful works exhibited at the German Cultural Center, among them Tebebe Terfa’s work on the famine.76 Kempf also said that the exhibitions were rarely discussed, and even when a discussion arose, “we made sure to empty it out from its political contents.”77 Consequently, venues were limited to artists who were not propagandists—unlike Esseye Gebremedhin in his 1981 presentation at the Yekinetebat Seminar. Women Artists and Revolutionary Motherland

As I indicated in chapter 3, political debates on “the woman question” had begun in the early years of the Ethiopian Student Movement among the young men and women of Haile Selassie I University. Few women actively advocated for the democratic rights of women during the 1960s, but their numbers increased in the 1970s, both at home and abroad. Under the auspices of the World Wide Federation of Ethiopian Students, study groups

that leaned toward a Marxist-Leninist ideology were formed in the United States and Europe to examine the struggles of women in Ethiopia and around the world. Lenin’s conviction that no revolution is possible without the participation of women was widely accepted, and Clara Zetkin’s Lenin on the Women’s Question (1920) became a seminal text to study. Publications by women on dereb chekona (the double oppression of class and gender)—such as Tenesh Ethiopiawit (Rise Ethiopian woman), which later became Tagey Ethiopiawit (Struggle Ethiopian woman)—aimed to create awareness and called for organized efforts against subjugation. Women’s study groups in North America and Europe were particularly active in the early 1970s in galvanizing separate political platforms within the Ethiopian Student Movement, as well as supporting women’s activism on the home front. This was also a time when groups such as the civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement were active both in North America and Europe, which immensely contributed to the radicalization of women. In the 1974 uprising, working women and female students and teachers demonstrated alongside their male compatriots. “For the first time in the history of the country,” wrote former student activist Genet Zewdie, “a labor strike was called by the Confederation of Ethiopian Labor Union [and] women joined the strike. Women organized themselves and went to the streets demanding for ‘equal pay,’ ‘for paid maternity leaves’ and ‘the right to organization.’”78 In its initial attempt to appease those behind the 1974 uprising, the military government tried to also address gender issues, although the 1975 Land Reform Proclamation still denied women the right to own land. The Derg formed the Ethiopian Women’s Coordinating Committee (EWCC) (Ye Ethiopia Setoch Astebabari Committee), primarily to raise gender political consciousness. The EWCC was encouraged to conduct and disseminate research through its publication Tenesh (Rise Woman) and was also given a mandate to organize seminars and conferences. In addition, several members of the EWCC were involved in the underground movement of the EPRP, which at the time had called for the establishment of a “peoples’ government” in lieu of military rule. Others were members of MEISON, an organization that initially gave conditional support to the military government. Members of the EWCC who also belonged to EPRP eventually dominated the leadership of EWCC—and this situation unnerved the government. As a result, it violently repressed the EWCC leadership. Some members went underground. Others were imprisoned or killed.

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In 1975, when hopes for change were still very high and when the EWCC was first established, debates over women’s issues had dominated newspapers and public forums. For instance, in December 1975, in its section called “Betely Lehewan” (Especially for Eve)—a tasteless and misdirected designation but nevertheless one of the few attempts to bring serious women’s issues to the forefront—Goh published an article entitled “Women in the Feudal System.” The article stated: “In order to understand the predicaments of women in the previous feudal system, it is important to understand the social and cultural makeup of a feudo-bourgeois system.”79 It argued that unless women achieved economic freedom, the patriarchal system could never be contested. But even as such articles attempted to consider women’s issues, other writings denigrated these same concerns. To cite one instance, in January 1975, Goh published a piece titled “Yeset Weslatoch Betazabiwoch Ayen” (Women Renegades in the Eyes of Observers), elaborating the problems of unemployed young women who had become adegegan hewan (dangerous Eves) and thereby insinuating that many young women were engaged in prostitution and, moreover, swindling men. The story of Eve and the identity of women that was inscribed in the narratives of “gender and morality” revealed the nature of women. The notion of the “deceitful woman” incorporated stereotypical feminine constructions such as duplicity and seduction. In 1977, Goh had changed the name of its “Beteley Lehewan” section to a more appropriate designation, “Beteley Lesetoch” (Especially for Women). And in that same year, after the military government had more or less consolidated its power, the nature of the debate about gender in government media had changed; didactic communist rhetoric dominated texts about women. “Beteley Lesetoch” began to feature articles about Russian women during the Bolshevik Revolution and Chinese women during China’s New Democratic Revolution. In addition to the spectacular sketches of soldiers, workers, and peasants that appeared on its cover page, Goh portrayed Ethiopian women who were adorned with Kalashnikovs. Polemics on the so-called woman question had also intensified in the late 1970s with the emergence of various underground movements. Democracia, the organ of the EPRP that called for an armed uprising against the Derg, was clandestinely but widely circulated, and it often addressed the necessary and urgent emancipation of women. In its attempt to once again flatter women and at the same time reduce the magnitude of the opposition that surrounded it, the Derg established

the Revolutionary Ethiopian Women’s Association (REWA). Though the association was allegedly organized to raise political awareness on gender issues, militant women accused the organization of being a propaganda and surveillance tool for the regime. In 1985, REWA’s rhetoric of gender had become increasingly authoritarian, and women from all over the country were forced to join the group; meanwhile, many others joined out of fear of being labeled antirevolutionaries. But despite these repressive measures, women’s participation in underground movements deepened all the more. Many women joined the multiple guerrilla movements of the time: the Tigray Peoples’ Revolutionary Front (TPLF), the Eritrean Peoples’ Liberation Front (EPLF), and the movements of the EPRP and later MEISON when it also went underground. The iconic portraits of these remarkable women, Kalashnikovs tied to their waists and fully decked out with military paraphernalia, are today found in photographic images, and they are unprecedented. Yet little is known about these women at the present time; we have nothing except these dramatic and poignant images. The conventional narrative of the underground movement is generally that of men, but a surprising number of women were also part of the movement. And more importantly, they continued to be mothers and wives in the midst of the armed struggle. This important historical context, including the often forgotten position of women at the time, is essential to any examination of women artists during the years 1974 to 1991. Female artists have generally been few in number historically, but in the Derg period, they were even scarcer. Many women were students at the Fine Art School during this era, including, among others, Eden Solomon, who was imprisoned before graduating; Bisrat Shebabaw; Haregwa Zeru; Genet Alfred; Fikirte Belayneh; Tigist Damte; Senafikish Zelleke; Menbere Yosef; Almaz Seletene; Kebedech Tekleab; and Elizabeth Habte Wold. Except for Bisrat Shebabaw, Senafikish Zelleke, Elizabeth Habte Wold, and Kebedech Tekleab, most did not continue as artists. After graduating, many left the country, among them Almaz Seletene. The ones who remained followed other career paths or simply became mothers and wives. Kebedech Tekleab

Kebedech left the Fine Art School before graduating and was incarcerated in a Somali prison for nine years, having been captured as she was fleeing

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the Derg across the Somali border. She remained a prisoner of war in the brutal camps of Somalia until her repatriation in 1989. After surviving the Derg’s atrocities, she would receive her BA in studio art and an MFA from Howard University. The River in Rwanda (1994) is Kebedech’s expression of the collective memory of genocide. Using as metaphor the Rwandan genocide of 1994—the most terrible genocide of the late twentieth century— Kebedech narrated a deeply entrenched hatred reminiscent of her own experience as well as a shared familiarity with human brutality. She stated: In my effort to address human suffering, as it might present itself to others in the world, I chose the art of painting as a medium of expression. This I did in two ways: first by focusing on the similarities between my experience and the histories of human suffering in other parts of the world; and second by examining the deleterious consequences of the notion of “civilization versus savagery” which has been widely used to justify genocide on part of the “civilized.”80 The River in Rwanda (Figure 4.17) illustrates the story of a bloodbath, and carnage resonates across the canvas. The vibration of colors expands the visual experience, brilliantly enlarging the receding and dissolving images of blood, bones, and bodies. When I interviewed Kebedech in 2002, she defied all types of categorization, for she thought her works transcended the vicissitudes of the Red Terror or the genocide in Rwanda. For her, human agony was a collective pandemonium of the human race rather than an explicit experience. “Human tragedy,” Kebedech said, “has often been the source from which many artists, in literary as well as the visual fields, have gained their source of energy, strength and influence. It has been in this context that my work has evolved. The tragedy of the Ethiopian-Somali war and my personal experience as an Ethiopian prisoner of that war in Somalia continues to be central in the expression of my art.”81 Shackled (1994), Behind the Bars (1994), and Solitary Confinement Series No. 1 (1994) are some of the many works that Kebedech has imbued with assiduous detail. The figures are mobile and constantly evolving, with beautiful bursts of color that confuse the vague relationship between beauty and chaos. Of note, Kebedech’s work is filled with texture, and that creates illusionary dimensional effects. Often, she uses her hand and a knife palette to craft the textures. The knife palette creates lines of weaving

Figure 4.17 Kebedech Tekleab. The River in Rwanda. 1994. 173 × 71.5 cm. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center; on loan, Theodora’s Art Group, LLC.

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compositions, giving the work its vitality and spirit. The images on the canvas are borderline abstractions, with human images almost always manifesting. She explained, “I found the study of them (human beings) to be central, since the human being is the most important element in my art. I also believe use of the human figure could be a strong board from which to leap into another form of emotional expression by deforming subjects and dealing with ambiguity of abstraction.”82 To that end, Kebedech uses nontraditional materials such as silver mesh, and her work continues to evolve from abstraction to nonobjective, from two-dimensional works to installations intended to bridge the gap between painting and sculpture. Although Kebedech left the Fine Art School during the Derg and the works that I have referenced were done in the 1990s, soon after the downfall of the military regime, she epitomizes the pain and suffering of the period and its relationship to the global crisis. As one of the few female artists who has successfully continued to work despite a long and difficult ordeal that no human being should have to bear, her sustained courage and determination exemplify the resilience and outstanding courage of the period’s female survivors and warriors. Yet the stories of most of the brave women fighters and activists were not told. Today, many of these women are forgotten and live on the brink of poverty. Even the female guerrilla fighters of the TPLF (tagays)—the movement that overthrew the Derg in 1991—who marched with their male comrades from the forest of Tigray to Addis Ababa to topple the military regime are curiously absent from the narratives of victory. If they are ever mentioned, it is as an accidental aside in a masculine discourse. Bisrat Shebabaw

Another significant female artist who remained in the country and continued to produce a substantial number of artworks is Bisrat Shebabaw. I focus on her work not only because she is one of the very few women artists who are still active but also because she has stayed in the country since graduating from the Fine Art School in 1985, except for a brief absence from 1986 to 1989 when she studied in the Soviet Union. Bisrat graduated in painting, and after her return from abroad, she participated in the official art of the time. Her graduation work, called Enat meret damena (Mother, earth, cloud) (Figure 4.18), centered on women workers and peasants.

Figure 4.18 Bisrat Shebabaw. Enat meret damena. 1985. 166 × 100 cm. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Alle School of Fine Art and Design.

The title resonates with the interwoven relationship between earth and motherhood that is depicted on the canvas. Here, a resilient earth nurtures and cares despite calamities and backlashes, and the female body continues to endure the vicissitudes of history, regardless of the substantial burden of guardianship that is innately apportioned to her. In the painting, women are seen in a farm field. Some are harvesting crops, some are planting, and some are standing and chatting. The artist talks about the fragmented lines in the image as a representation of musical rhythms. She is an avid lover of classical music, particularly Beethoven, and music always accompanies her when she paints. Enat meret damena portrays strong women, some of them tall and beautiful, and as with many of her later works that I cover in chapter 5, the curves on their bodies are emphasized as if to show their pride as gendered identities. The apparel of these women is highlighted with flowing white shamas, and the beauty that the color of the shamas evokes simultaneously draws the viewer’s eye and creates a desire to gaze. Bisrat never objectifies her women but instead sexualizes them, and in Enat meret damena, she does exactly that. Like many of her later works on images of women, this painting is highly sexualized, referencing women’s sexual subjectivity and power even in the midst

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of tyranny. The field is painted brown, and the landscape is rendered in shades of blue and white, colors that perfectly complement the grace and elegance of the women’s dresses. As with many of Bisrat’s later works, the image of “woman” in this painting can be read in several contexts. Here, the women look like they are working, but as the viewer explores further, conflicting imaginaries of women appear to surface. Bisrat seems to be attempting to engage in an unexamined area of sexual subjectivity. She has said that her images are generally representative of women who have played a role in her life. Though she is one of a very few women artists who critically engage in issues of femininity, she also says her works are not bound to tradition, heritage, or even gender. Yet even as early as 1985 when Bisrat worked on Enat meret damena, women’s agency and gender politics were curious elements in her work. In the midst of the Derg regime, in which Bisrat was only expected to present women workers, Enat meret damena invigorated female subjectivity not only by rejecting official art deceptively but also by appropriating women’s sexual identity outside the defining social powers associated with forms of sexuality and separate from its rigidly controlled norms. Indeed, conventions are extremely powerful and the male gaze is so omnipresent that the few women artists in the country had historically positioned the Ethiopian woman as an objectified female figure. This has drastically shifted with contemporary women artists, as I discuss in chapter 5. The female body as imagined, manipulated, and defined and the social and political situation that continues to repress women are featured in the works of many contemporary African artists. Corporeal strategies that convert the body into an ultimate text and a performing agent have become central narratives in African women’s art. Unfortunately, in Ethiopia, the prohibitions on women’s images are so strong that private experiences of femininity are not articulated. Whether or not Bisrat relates to the problematization of Ethiopian femininity, her contemporary works are as much about gender politics as they are about art. They have been dismissed as warm and feminine because she mostly depicts women’s images. Nevertheless, her works present women in multiple ways. Clearly, in the midst of repression, her graduation work demonstrated the value of looking at visual culture through the lens of gender. And after the fall of the Derg, she continued to experiment through different types of works, and her powerful portrayals of women are emblematic in all.

Currently a professor of painting in the Fine Art School, Bisrat continues to produce magnificent artworks that attempt to subvert the passive and sanitized versions of the dominant female imaginary. By Way of Conclusion

In his translation of Joseph Stalin’s Marxism and the Problems of Language (1979), Debebe Seifu wrote: “Since language is a communicative tool, this book by Joseph Stalin addresses questions that have become urgent in regards to uses of new terminologies that can contextualize our revolution.”83 And indeed, Debebe explored the interiority of the Amharic language to embrace and reinterpret Marxist-Leninist revolutionary terminologies, ultimately redefining meanings and representations through the range of Ethiopian linguistics and culture. However, scholars such as Semeneh Ayalew and Binyam Mendisu have argued that the reinterpretation of revolutionary terminologies “could extensively help in explaining why political discourse during the revolution turned the way it did, and whether the use of the terms has led to the bloodbath of the revolution.”84 Taking the word yewdam (be demolished) as an equivalent for the English down with, as in Down with imperialism!—a slogan that was frequently used by all revolutionary parties of the period (the Derg, EPRP, and MEISON)—Semeneh and Benyam problematized the “etymology, semantic and mismatch in translation.”85 Though the original meaning of yewdam denoted “demolishment, elimination or total annihilation of a big concrete and inanimate object,”86 the word was eventually employed “to denounce a political group or their ideas.”87 In further retranslation of the word, yewdam was used in the abstract to refer to the annihilation of a system and to “a destruction of a group of people.”88 This and other terms used in such contexts by both the state and the civilian opposition showed extreme animosity toward those outside of one’s own party or other affiliation. Benyam and Semeneh analyzed terminologies as sites of memory and remembrance and argued that “the study of revolutionary terminology could be ways in which we can understand the nature of political discourse and the consequences that such a discourse have on our recent history.”89 I bring up Benyam and Semeneh’s investigation of revolutionary terminology because Ethiopia’s seventeen-year experience with scientific socialism requires analysis beyond the apparent. The political ideas and

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artistic sentiments of this era emerged from ambiguities over appropriation, mediation, and comprehension of the ideology that gave rise to the period. Therefore, the art object alone can in no way predetermine the complex political and sociocultural subjectivities of the period. And artists’ conflicting memories of the time have only exacerbated the problems that pertain to the processes and creative flows of the art object. Furthermore, artists such as Bisrat Shebabaw today say that “they just did what was expected of them.”90 Works they produced during the Derg are not part of their collections, and many do not even know the whereabouts of those works; it is as if they want to completely forget the period. Hence, at issue also is the historical account of Ethiopian modernism that went from one stage to another—from the aesthetic climate of the socialist state to contemporary artistic practice—without thoroughly addressing the legacy that preceded contemporary art. But what was most interesting in the process of examining this period was not only the search for clarity in defining the period’s artistic production and the circulation of its meanings but also the readings of the allegorical material history that was circumscribed within images of tension. Thus, it is the intensity and innovation that gathered around and within artistic subjectivity that proved most relevant.

Chapter 5

Contemporary Ethiopian Art 1995–2015

seventh anniversary of the Dimension Group (1995–2001), which was established four years after the fall of the military regime, Geta Mekonnen remarked, “The three separate epochs in Ethiopia over the last three decades, in their unique ways, have affected the life of artists, creating a situation for reflection and contemplation.”1 The founding of Dimension brought together five painters and three sculptors of the same generation who believed at the time that Ethiopian artists were at a crossroads. Geta, one of the founders, recalled that “modern Ethiopian art after the fall of the Derg was trying to find itself after seventeen years of dictated aesthetics, and thus the necessity to have brought a group like this together.”2 In the seven years of its existence, the Dimension Group had seven annual exhibitions, with one guest artist exhibiting with the group each year. In 2001, when the group held its last exhibition, the Fine Art School became the School of Fine Art and Design and was incorporated into Addis Ababa University. Did artists produce works in response to the end of official art and the collapse of authoritarian military rule? Did they mourn, remember, and critically engage with overcoming the past? Did Ethiopian On the

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socialism shape the practices of postsocialist contemporary art? What constitutes contemporary Ethiopian art today, and with which issues do artists in Ethiopia locate their practices? These are questions that I critically examine to understand the legacies of the military regime and to position, in both political and academic terms, the constellation of themes and thinkers encompassing contemporary Ethiopian art. Nationalist Imagination Once Again Anew (1991 to the present)

The regime of the military junta forced Ethiopian artists and intellectuals to make difficult political and personal choices, and many opted to emigrate to Europe and the United States. The artists and intellectuals who remained in the country witnessed the fall of the regime and the dictates of official taste, and they immediately began to freely express their vision. Many revolted against the previous regime’s emblematic art forms, but as Geta said, many also turned to traditional Coptic repertoires for inspiration. Art after the fall of the military regime subsequently sought to subvert and challenge the institutional structures of the prior socialist state. But critical conversations that attended to changing definitions of artistic practice and subjectivity were substantially lacking, which was particularly salient because the broader global political context of postsocialist Ethiopia had also dramatically shifted. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall collapsed, and by late 1991, the Soviet Union had dissolved into several republics. The Iron Curtain had been lifted, and the Cold War had come to an end. The global political domain had also changed, and new forms of global powers had emerged. The political violence of the socialist state was replaced with new political conditions as the postsocialist transformation followed several divergent routes. In the years that followed the end of state socialism, the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) (1991 to the present), which had toppled the military regime, redefined the nature of politics with new economic, social, and institutional agendas. Once a leftist armed guerrilla movement, the EPRDF, as if ostensibly afraid to betray its leftist roots, interwove old words to grasp a new language of world order. Different categories of truth arose, and in the 1990s, ideas that were caught somewhere between neoliberal ideology and “revolutionary democracy” (abyotawi) began to emerge in official discourse.3 The so-called revolutionary

democratic state prioritized group rights over individual rights and underwrote state-sponsored microenterprise development initiatives. Still, there was hope and optimism in the first years after the EPRDF took power. Even through its paradoxical and vexing revolutionary democratic rhetoric, the state encouraged freedom of expression during the early years, and free media proliferated. Dissent and consent over political promises and social environments were equally acknowledged, and for the first time in Ethiopian modern history, the state appeared to have embraced the values of democratic rights. However, when dissent over the state’s official ideology of revolutionary democracy seemed to threaten the political order, the illusion of democracy waned and social tensions began to emerge. Ironically, just as the Derg had betrayed democratic aspirations in the past, the EPRDF once again systematically regulated dissent. By the early to mid-2000s, the politics of the EPRDF had radically shifted. Increasingly drawn into post–Cold War global economic and political conditions, the revolutionary democratic state gradually changed into the revolutionary developmental state.4 In the absence of an economic model that clearly addressed Ethiopia’s relationship to global economic networks and powers in various forms, the mediation between leftist rhetoric and capitalist economic policies has since become perplexing. What we find presently is massive unemployment, repression of expression, and obscene levels of corruption. Neither revolutionary nor democratic, the state has imposed official narratives of progressive economic change over wide gaps in income that continue to expand. And it has long since replaced its leftist orientation with profoundly different configurations in social and political structures that exclusively subsist on foreign aid. In the broader sense, critique had become particularly essential in efforts to encapsulate the complexities of postsocialist Ethiopian life. By the year 2000, ethnopolitical constituencies, some that were organized by the government and some that rivaled the regime, had multiplied, triggering great concern about ethnic insurgencies. In 1994, the Federal Constitution had ratified a “multi-cultural federation based on ethno national representation.”5 As the International Crisis Group’s Africa Report (2012) stated: “The regime not only restructured the state into the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, but also redefined citizenship, politics and identity on ethnic grounds . . . [thereby instituting] ethnically defined politics that decentralize rather than mitigate inter-ethnic relations.”6 In addition to the

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edifices of politics and identity based on ethnic frameworks, the absence of a genuine multiparty democratic system also caused growing ethnic tensions. The ruling party’s clear refusal to share power in 2005 and the state’s violence with regard to democratic rights exacerbated ethnic tensions, economic disparities, and other discontents. That the ruling party coercively sabotaged the results of the 2005 election, which significantly leaned toward the opposition party, is an irrefutable truth. It was also then that the state took complete control of the press. In subsequent elections, the EPRDF won overwhelmingly—with an alleged 99 percent of the votes in 2010 and 100 percent in 2015, in a scenario where all opposition parties were blocked. The government has since degenerated into authoritarianism, as freedom of speech has been curtailed and hundreds have been imprisoned for opposing the politics of the state. Scores of newspapers are now banned, and young journalists who once ran provoking and stimulating columns in newspapers such as Addis Neger have gone into exile to escape incarceration.7 Addis Neger, which was particularly savvy in its focus on literature and the arts, was shut down in 2006. Once again, what had seemed like a viable democratic state at its inception turned authoritarian in later years. What is more, the revolutionary developmental state presumes there is a close link between culture and politics—that is, an interwoven relationship between culture and development, not necessarily with one enhancing the other but often with politics reinventing culture to promote political strategies. For the current Ethiopian state, the enrichment of human lives through culture—music, literature, visual arts, and other forms of expression—can only be valued if it serves the purposes of state politics and if it exclusively informs that very commitment. The nationalist imagination has once again shifted from previous imaginaries, this time to an “imagined community” of lemat (development). But whose imagined community will this be? This is a vexing question that the collective imagination unremittingly queries. People are asked to rally under the slogan Lematawi Ethiopia (Toward developmental Ethiopia). In fact, lemat has become the state’s polemical tool to impede any sort of opposition against its politics. Meanwhile, an illusion of developmental progress is propagated on a daily basis through government mass media, kebele associations (neighborhood organizations structured and controlled by the state), and other promotional strategies designed to shift people’s discursive consciousness towards lemat and to create an induced amnesia about glaring shortcomings such as poverty,

violations of human rights, and other forms of dispossession. A new understanding of the nation is imposed, and fear suffuses any citizens who dare show uncertainty about the technology and development projects that the state is purportedly trying to implement. Labeling forms of cultural expressions as lematawi sene tebeb (developmental arts and culture), the state has entwined politics and culture in such a way as to discourage free artistic expression, particularly in public academic institutions. In its place, the government encourages thematic productions of arts and culture that glorify the state’s development projects, such as the construction of the dam at the Nile, referred to as the hedasie gedeb (renaissance dam). Considering free artistic expression an extravagance to be enjoyed exclusively in more developed countries, the state gives financial incentives to those cultural producers engaged in promoting the government’s propagandist messages. But more troubling still are the state’s surveillance and censorship practices. The use of social media is excessively scrutinized and, when necessary, intermittently blocked. In venues such as theater houses, plays are evaluated based on the inclusion or exclusion of developmental types of political messages, and actors and producers are coerced to offer works that glorify the state’s projects.8 It is against all of this political background that I interrogate artistic imagination and subjectivity. Framing Contemporary Art

Despite the state’s efforts to occupy artists with works that respond to political projects, an art scene independent of state-sanctioned propaganda has proliferated in the last few years. Most of the works produced in this independent sector are paintings on canvas, and they are sold to private collectors. Accordingly, if we want to comprehend the grounding and predicament of contemporary art, it is important to understand the current disposition of the art market. In previous eras, the buying and selling of art was literally nonexistent, but today, a new generation of elite, nouveau riche collectors are increasingly buying paintings that incorporate familiar and realistic themes. These works are specifically designed to decorate the walls of the ostentatious mansions that have sprung up in Addis Ababa in recent years. Though it is encouraging to see the emergence of a market for art, it is imperative to reveal its adverse effects as well, for this new market encroaches on the

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genuine growth of experimental and innovative art. Responding to market demands, many artists are exclusively engaged in producing repetitive themes and styles to accommodate the tastes of buyers; in the meantime, experimental and critical works continue to be sidelined. To be sure, some artists fear repercussions from the state if they produce works that reflect their lived realities. But a large number of artists are also enticed by the financial rewards the new market had generated. Despite this, a few experimental artworks have emerged recently and taken new forms in capturing present-day experiences. But even though there has been an increase in the number of artists since 2010, this has had little impact on the institutional structures of critical discourse. Such privation can directly be attributed to the scholastic limitations of the Alle School of Fine Art and Design, where many artists receive their formal training. Every year, the school produces twenty to twenty-five graduates in modern painting, sculpture, graphics, industrial design, and art education. But in a school that focuses on academic and realistic art of the classic Renaissance categories, artistic interventions that conjure new possibilities through which artists can articulate the complexities of their lived realities are rarely interrogated. Courses in disciplines such as cultural theory, museology, art theory, criticism, and history are seldom provided, although these are exceptionally significant branches of learning; this is especially true today because the canonical ontologies of classical modernism that the school predominantly surveys have radically shifted to accommodate the rise and development of modernism in different genealogies and geographies. In other words, the archives of classical modernism, which once comprised a universal category, have been challenged in the past few decades to revisit, as Andreas Huyssen put it, “varieties of modernism formerly excluded from the Euro American canon as derivative and imitative, and therefore inauthentic.”9 Though emphasis should be placed on deciphering the categories and knowledge of European modernist expression that the Alle School of Fine Art and Design predominantly focuses on, the untangling of individual and collective identity, historical memory, and specific contexts that are unique to Ethiopia is equally important. This is because these types of articulations foreground multiple imaginaries about what it means to be Ethiopian in the current political, cultural, and social framework of the state. As a result, one of the thorniest issues of contemporary art in Ethiopia is the absence of critical debate that situates artistic production and

subjectivity within current social, economic, and political contexts. But increasingly, younger professors are raising questions and doubts about the school’s arcane intellectual tradition, which ignores their lived experiences. These experiences include, for example, the incarceration of their peers without due process, glaring gaps in income, the massive displacement of people who are moved from cities to give way to high-rise buildings, and the many other political injustices they frequently confront. In some instances, young professors have managed to conduct their own workshops, seminars, and exhibitions to address pressing concerns. And in 2015, the Alle School started a graduate program in fine arts, with a curriculum that comprehensively incorporates pertinent critical theory courses. This came about despite many professors’ consistent rejection of attempts to establish critical disciplines to explore the legacies of the past within contemporary contexts of local and global cultural mediations. I focus on artists and the artists’ collectives whose production responds to the changing pressures of time and place, particularly the ambiguities of modern citizenship in the Ethiopian state. Although they are not yet included in the international biennales or most other global exhibition platforms, these artists are critical. They can contribute to the global dynamics of contemporary African art and challenge the ambivalent and complex politics of postcolonial identities. In mediums such as photography and video, as well as others that are ephemeral and intangibly intuitive, artists have begun to produce critical works that reflect their cultural, economic, and social environments. Although they are few in number, these are artists whose works will, I contend, permit a wider understanding of the conflicts and tensions that are faced in the postcolony; eventually, they will also place contemporary Ethiopian art in the global art geography. I should note that diaspora Ethiopian artists are not included in this analysis because the book centers on translating local sensibilities and imaginaries that are unique in their located approaches. Artists’ Collectives Earlier Collectives T he D imension G roup ( 1 9 9 5 – 2 0 0 1 )

During the early years of hope and optimism after the EPRDF came to power, artistic practice had taken on new dimensions. Art exhibitions

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were abundant, and galleries such as Asni, the first experimental gallery that showcased innovative works, had opened. Founded in 1995 by Konjit Seyum, Asni Gallery ushered in—perhaps for the first time in Ethiopian art history—a particularly interesting platform that shaped new forms of artistic curiosities and imaginations. Asni was the only prominent contemporary art space, and its mere presence encouraged a competitive community of artists who were eager to show their works. Furthermore, young journalists wrote about arts and culture in the many newspapers that had recently been established. And an ever larger number of artists had begun to engage in completely new forms of aesthetics, as opposed to those that were routinely produced during the seventeen years of dictated aesthetic. The Dimension Group emerged during this unprecedented time. It was established in 1995 by Behailu Bezabih, Bekele Mekonnen, Eshetu Tiruneh, Geta Mekonnen, Kidane Belay, Mezgebu Tessema, Muzie Awel, and Tadesse Mesfin. Except for Geta Mekonnen, who received his MFA from the Slade School in London, and Behailu Bezabih, who remained in the country after getting his BFA, all were sent by the military regime to pursue their MFA degrees in the former Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries. “As varied as our educational background and artistic interests were,” said Geta Mekonnen, “it was important for us to come together to begin some kind of innovation in art that had been severely damaged during seventeen years of socialist rule.”10 The word dimension was translated from the Amharic word awtar, which refers to a tightened string of a harp, a guy rope of a tent, or a ray of the sun. As the initial publication of the group stated: Each string of the harp creates its own sound but together with other strings it creates melody. One guy rope does not hold the tent straight but together with others it can support a shelter. Thus, the idea is for each artist to bring their individual light so that together a brighter light is created. The Dimension group does not attempt to solicit any singular response to the variety of issues that is featured in contemporary Ethiopian art. As the derivation of its name would suggest, there is not just a single direction to be followed. There are a multitude of them, a great many possibilities for the established, as well as the up and coming artist.11 Although the purely realistic works of Mezgebu Tessema and Eshetu Tiruneh widely diverged from the works of Geta Mekonnen, Behailu

Bezabih, and Bekele Mekonnen both in form and in concept, the group managed to function effectively for seven years. Dimension was highly vibrant, not only with its annual exhibitions but also with its regular dialogues and poetry recitals. Many of the artists who graduated from the schools in the Soviet Union, such as Mezgebu Tessema, indulged in academic works, but nonacademic and investigative approaches generated exciting and imaginative works from Geta Mekonnen, Behailu Bezabih, and Bekele Mekonnen. For instance, in the group’s 2001 exhibition, Behailu Bezabih’s L’Arc de Triomphe (Figure 5.1) engaged the animated and anarchic energy of childhood, and Geta Mekonnen’s photographic work Mestawot (Mirror) addressed the havoc caused in city shops by a public disturbance in Addis Ababa in 2001. Geta Mekonnen’s photographic works signaled optically accurate renderings of a bleak present and at the same time served as a reminder of and fresh elegy for a past that threatened to come back. One set of provocative images captured bruised spirits of past and present to explore the memories of violence, and the resonances of past violence could not run any deeper than they did in these remarkable photographs. The same exhibition showcased Bekele Mekonnen’s Our Time 2001 (Figure 5.2), a sculpture made from indigenous Figure 5.1 Behailu Bezabih. L’Arc

de Triomphe. 1998. 50 × 30 cm. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of Behailu Bezabih.

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Figure 5.2 Bekele Mekonnen. Our Time. 2001. Mixed media. Courtesy of Bekele

Mekonnen.

materials such as akmbalo (the cover used to make Ethiopian bread, which is called injera), pestles, and mortars. Our Time 2001 spoke of the people’s degradation and suffering. “The end of the Derg regime and the coming of the EPRDF,” said a newspaper review, “did not restore any faith in Bekele. He saw the never-ending human tragedy and continuation of suffering and degradation of Ethiopia’s people.”12 Bekele’s use of local materials to address issues around the memory of past political events, as well as contemporary political questions, gave these images an agonizing and poignant moral fiber. Although he received his MFA in sculpture from Moscow State Institute of Fine Arts, his works did not adhere to the rigid classical styles that were pursued by many of his colleagues who were also members of the group and trained in similar institutions. Moreover, his works had a certain charm in their veracity. To date, his sculptures are unlike any others. Not only does he use local materials but he also defies the basic conventional assumptions of the medium. The works of Bekele Mekonnen, Behailu Bezabih, and Geta Mekonnen stood in stark contrast to those of other members of the group in their mixture of agitation and openness, and in my opinion, this contributed to the demise of the group. As Bekele, Behailu, and Geta became increasingly experimental in their creative punches, in contrast to the safe and sedate styles of the rest of the artists, the group no longer lived up to the name

awtar. Geta believed that the arrival of Yohannes Gedamu from Germany contributed to the free impulse and inventiveness of his own works, as well as those of Behailu and Bekele. A student of Gebre Kristos Desta, Yohannes lived in Cologne, Germany, and worked as a full-time artist from 1980 until his return to Ethiopia in 1997. According to Rebecca Nagy, “His paintings are distinguished by abstract images that often suggest landscapes, but with few recognizable forms, or none at all. His fluid color and emotive use of color recall the expressionistic style of his teacher and friend Gebre Kristos Desta and of German and other European Expressionists whose work both artists knew from their years living in Cologne and traveling on the continent.”13 The Dimension Group had its last exhibition in October 2001 at the Alliance Ethio Française and disintegrated thereafter. As of 2015, Bekele and Behailu continue to create provocative works, but Geta says that he has “temporarily suspended his artistic career.”14 Today, he owns a thriving design company and continues to write on the art scene in Ethiopia. Muzie Awel served as the director of the School of Fine Art and Design from 2005 to 2010 and is currently a teacher in the same school. Eshetu Tiruneh has established his own art school, and Mezgebu Tessema and Tadesse Mesfin are currently teaching at the Alle School of Fine Art and Design. Kidane Belay died in 2000. What was the group’s legacy? Although Eshetu Tiruneh argues that the collective failed to leave any bequest to younger artists and to the artistic environment of the time, Bekele and Geta contend that, at a minimum, the group managed to complicate and disturb the forms of art that had come about after the fall of the Derg in 1991, which were generally embellished forms of Orthodox Coptic repertoires. They argue that the frequent dialogues conducted by the group regarding modern Ethiopian art, as well as the emergence of experimental works that were few yet highly imaginative, left an impact that should not be underestimated and that ushered in a new way of thinking about modern art. Certainly this is true, but I would also argue that the very lack of a proper academic discipline of history and criticism quelled what should have impelled significant developments in the production of critical practice. N ew A rt S pace M onastery ( N A S G edam )

(2003–6)

Not formally organized like the Dimension Group, the four young artists who named their space the New Art Space Monastery (NAS Gedam) all

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lived in the same house and became visible through a group exhibition conducted there in 2003. These artists were Tesfahun Kibru, Tamerat Gezahegn, Dawit Geressu, and Mulugeta Kassa, all graduates of the School of Fine Art and Design. What made this group interesting was their deployment of mediums that varied from hide and metal to salvaged material, garbage, and other refuse. Their fascination with unconventional elements led to unique and inventive approaches, and their works challenged viewers to think in new and unorthodox ways. In a radical break from Christian Orthodox themes, spontaneous and exciting features emerged through the group’s numerous exhibitions. But by the end of 2006, the NAS Gedam had disintegrated, and what had seemed like a promising movement came to a halt. Both groups of artists, the Dimension Group and NAS Gedam, drew attention to types of art forms that differed from the classical format taught at the School of Fine Art and Design—perhaps for the first time after the fall of the military regime. Yet both groups of artists were regrettably isolated from transnational debates and practices and the archive of imaginings that constituted such discussions. Consequently, while pushing the boundaries for radical artistic practice, they could not interrogate the multiple imaginaries that engaged the questions of history, memory, and identity that were interwoven with the legacies of the past—though they anxiously sought to excavate them. I argue that both groups of artists played important roles in bringing a new vision and outlook to the contemporary art scene. Ultimately, however, the lack of an infrastructure that would have nurtured their own crucial engagement with their works contributed to the midstream conclusion of their promising imaginative expression. Later Collective: Netsa Art Village (Free Art Village) (2008–15)

Netsa Art Village was formed in 2008 by nine graduates of the School of Fine Art and Design. One of the most provocative art spaces of its time, Netsa tested the boundaries of the contemporary environment. Reflecting on a wide variety of issues that challenge citizenship, the artists in this collective addressed exclusion in its numerous manifestations. They also organized frequent artistic activities, including music concerts, art festivals, art performances, children’s art workshops, poetry readings, and video art screenings, as well as collaborative works with several international artists. Netsa was located in a public park called Ferensay, and it had become a

the major tourist destination and an important art spot before it was closed by state authorities in 2015. Perhaps the collective’s most significant intervention was the Wax and Gold project, a public-space undertaking in 2012. It was the first of its kind in taking art out into public spaces. Fifteen artists participated, creatively demonstrating contested notions of development and the state’s violation of citizens’ freedom of expression. Focusing on concerns about the new social conditions that had drastically changed Addis Ababa in recent years, the artists of Netsa confronted the threat of authoritarian concepts of development and the uncompromising alteration of social structures that development entailed. They protested the fact that under the existing regime, citizens had no right to the city and its development projects, which continued to radically disrupt lives. Moreover, the artists of Netsa challenged the legitimacy and authority of a state that was endangering citizenship, resulting in a growing polarity between state and citizen and causing complex and very troubling problems. Indeed, as Addis Ababa experienced massive transformations in the area of development, traditional networks and strategies were literally decimated. Neighborhoods were dismantled, and neighbors who lived together for decades were separated. Along with their separation came the obliteration of profound and necessary community groups such as idir (a neighborhood organization set up to provide assistance for members in times of crisis, including death). Small shopkeepers who had earned their livelihoods from local shoppers were suddenly thrown out of business and forced to live in destitution in the suburbs. Safe and simple refuges no longer existed in areas where boundaries were frequently resituated. The state’s fascination with “rapid development” had been expressed in languages of development that failed to accommodate the realities in which alterities transpired. For the state, the broader field of alterity was instead subsumed with changes in traditional cultures and indigenous infrastructures, such as the idir, that were believed to have blocked technology and development. The very nature of modern existence in Addis Ababa and its implications were effectively conveyed in the Wax and Gold exhibit. For instance, Mulugeta Gebrekidan offered a powerful performance as part of the project. Positioning himself in one of the busiest roundabouts in the city, one that showcased a huge emblem of Samsung, he posed as martyr and hero (Figure 5.3).

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Figure 5.3 Mulugeta Gebrekidan. 2013. Performance for the Wax and Gold Project.

Along with new road construction, numerous roundabouts had sprung up in Addis Ababa. Leaving aside the politics surrounding historical and collective memory regarding these types of sites as well as debates about memorialization, these locations were conventionally staged in an attempt to mediate with the past and preserve national memory and identity. In the context of Addis Ababa, however, these purportedly public spaces had been privatized by big conglomerates such as Samsung in order to advertise their products. Garbed in the traditional attire of a war hero, Mulugeta stood still inside the roundabout overlooking the huge insignia of Samsung. The unprecedented responses from passersby echoed in the air—honking automobile horns, whistles, and verbal shouts of “Bravo!” Mulugeta’s strong social message confronted the politics and the paradoxes behind notions of memory, where efforts to find appropriate conceptual outlines to guide the framing of this inquiry had become perplexing and hazy. Today’s regimen of power insists on lematawi sene tebeb (art for development), lematawi sene seouf (literature for development), or lematawi muzika (music for development) and does not tolerate the production of art, literature, or music without the intonation of development, as if development and identity are one and the same.

A critical few, such as the members of Netsa, had sidestepped these disciplines of power to challenge the contemporary social and political phenomena of development. In a country where freedom of speech was extremely restricted, this group of young artists pushed the boundaries in bold yet tamped-down attempts that creatively manipulated the hegemonies of power. They used public spaces as sites of performance to broach multilayered philosophical and ethical questions around memory, the conception of place and space, and citizens’ relationship to what was to become the new and modern Addis Ababa. Unfortunately, Netsa Art Village—whose physical space in a public park was given by the city to the group when it was formed in 2008—was ordered to vacate the park in January 2015. The city has since claimed that it needed the space to build a “constructive arts and culture tourist site” in line with the state’s aim to project state-provisioned arts and culture practices. No matter what its intention—whether to sanction social interventionist artistic practices or to promote the relations of art to urbanism, which it supposes can only be explored through the political realm of development—the state has assumed a role not only in controlling and systematizing artistic production but also in defining categories of spatialization, thereby executing the hegemonies of space. Until Netsa took it over and animated the space, Ferensay was an abandoned public park. It became a public space of social action because of Netsa’s activities. But it is presently recontrolled and reimagined, its spatial expression now intended to stage the politics of the state. To this end, the space—its physical and social dynamic—is presently structured as a site to partially express the state’s politics and culture, and that places into doubt the multiple, participatory, and representative political culture of public spaces. The artists of Netsa most emphatically underscored the urgent need to critically reflect on the agency and truth of development. Early Practices in Contemporary Art (2000–10): The Works of Bekele Mekonnen

Though few in number, the critical works of individual artists emerged in the early part of the twenty-first century. Artists such as Bekele Mekonnen attempted provocative works that articulated the political, social, and historical conditions of Ethiopia. Indeed, Bekele strove to conceptualize a

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new artistic consciousness while he was member of the Dimension Group. And in the years after the group’s demise, he continued all the more to incorporate his lived experiences in his works, and he remapped those experiences to find himself within Ethiopia’s present. Engaging in new forms of aesthetics, he struggled to locate his practice and subjectivity in larger global perspectives. He experimented in new forms and material that had symbolical resonances. Bekele was the director of the School of Fine Art and Design from 2001 to 2003 and again from 2010 to 2013 and currently is a professor of sculpture. His pointed critiques immediately stand out through the trope of vernacular objects. He grew up in Debre Zeit, a city located 40 kilometers from Addis Ababa that is known for an air force base built by Emperor Haile Selassie. Unlike many of his childhood friends, who were intrigued by the military jets, Bekele spent his young years writing love letters and poems. An incredible contemporary poet, he employs both images and words to create stimulating compositions. Bekele is perhaps best known for the use of local materials, such as an iron plate and plow, to interrogate time-honored practices in order to locate the present. For example, in an exhibition entitled Enkokelesh, held at the Alliance Française in 2004, he explored the riddles behind poverty and degradation. The word Enkokelesh literally means “the riddle of life,” but Enkokelesh is also an ancient Ethiopian game of riddles in question-andanswer format. Often, the riddles are quite difficult to solve. In his exhibit, Bekele seemed to pose queries whose solutions were tentative. How does one read the riddle of life? How does one define citizenship? And what is the riddle behind our contemporary contradictions? The plow is traditionally made from metal that is folded and molded to form a sharp instrument for turning the earth. However, Bekele’s plows are erect but curled at the tip, concurrently suggesting both their hardy nature and also their incapacity. Plows are known to have been in use in the present form for the past three thousand years, and those in Bekele’s work express an arrogance in their posture, perhaps suggesting the pride and dignity of a people. Even with their bowed tops, they seem dignified and vain. Inside the soiled gallery space, they are found priming themselves in front of a mirror. They look like they are in a battle with one another but also appear to be leading the crowd. They take on color and stand in unison, but they also pose back-to-back to magnify their tension. Bekele speaks of his

people through the unrefined exterior, indigenous physicality, and utility of the metal in its natural hues, often exaggerated with the use of pigments to enhance the tones. The artist has chosen to focus primarily on local objects commonly used for the production of food. In employing everyday objects such as the iron plow and the iron plate, he explores these objects as metaphors, both in form and material. As a cultivating tool, the plow burrows into the earth, which the artist represents as an iron plate. He also symbolizes their affinity with the earth from which the metal is smelted. The phallic form of the iron plow and the round shape of the iron plate, furthermore, represent gendered identities. One plow in Enkokelesh (Figure 5.4) pierces the plate with the raw wooden bone of its handle and yet fails to make contact with the plate’s fertile area, forcing a hole through its surface in vain and violently ripping it open, while the earth watches this drama in silent anguish. As literary scholar Dagmawi Woubshet said of Bekele’s works: “What might such intervention signify? It questions, for one, the plow’s phallic import, its easy availability to symbolize gendered labor— male labor—as the locus of and vehicle to power, progress, survival and futurity.”15 Bekele’s plow and plate evoked a critical understanding of recent Ethiopian history. In a metaphoric engagement with farmers’ lives, the artist signified the production and reproduction of Ethiopia’s ancient life and its contemporary life as well. Bekele’s last exhibition was held in 2008. He has extensively engaged in public monument works since then, and these works have drawn critical attention. Commissioned directly by the state, he played a collaborative role in creating the Figure 5.4 Bekele Mekonnen. Enkokelesh.

2004. Smelted metal works. Courtesy of Bekele Mekonnen.

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Amhara Martyr’s Monument and the Bahir Dar Convention House,16 both in Bahir Dar, and he had the most significant single role in the composition of the Oromiya Martyr’s Monument in Adama (Figure 5.5). In contrast to his earlier works, these monuments, with their explicit and powerful symbols, were conceived within the realm of state politics. The monuments were deliberately commissioned by the government to shape opinions on the forms of “imagined community.” The controversy they have provoked rests more on their association with the politics of the state rather than on the columns or arches that are the monuments’ visual elicitations. Of the Amhara monument, Bekele said: I have no problem in having a monument that commemorates those who have died for their country in what they believed. My problem is that we find ourselves in a different Figure 5.5 Bekele Mekonnen. Oromiya Martyr’s Monument. 2013. Adama, Ethiopia.

predicament than what these martyrs had died for. But this futility cannot falsify their sacrifice at all. And that is why I decided to be part of it. I would also have taken part in a martyrdom project that commemorated the Ethiopian army before the EPRDF.17 But the armies of the Derg that Bekele mentioned fought and died for the regime’s larger causes and are no longer part of Ethiopian history; their stories are lost and abandoned, and they have faded into the past. Yet these soldiers were martyrs who defended the nation’s sovereignty, regardless of the fact that they were used by the regime to manipulate a particular type of nationalist politics and memory. Perhaps Bekele thought it important to commemorate martyrdom outside the political discourse of the state. He argued that by staging such images, an artist participated in the creation of multiple national memories, and he pointed to the monuments he did for the state as examples. In other words, he suggested that the suffering of victims deserved reflection, however contentious the politics behind this suffering was. A most fundamental query in this postulation involves the inclusive and exclusive spatial accounts of history and memory and the politics behind spatial arrangements—that is, how, when, and why public spaces are represented by the state. At best, memorials function as sites of reconciliation and celebration. Unfortunately, what people should remember and forget in the current political state of Ethiopia is more often than not selective and prescribed. The selective memory of a visual image that suggests the significance of a certain political and social event is therefore critical. And this conveyance within the present political discourse of a nation is even more pressing—particularly when the state dictates a certain type of history for the collective national memory and when its commemorative memorials and exhibits so often become mere propaganda tools. Consider the recent contention over commemorative memorials such as the statue of Emperor Menelik II that was once going to be dismantled by the current state because of the carnage the emperor wrought in the Ethiopian south. Yet it was this very man who, for the first time in the history of black people, overpowered an allegedly invincible white army. Clearly, Ethiopia’s patriotic sentiment, which was so important for black people worldwide, had

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received a contradictory reception in its own country. Once scorned by the current state, this legacy of Menelik II—the Battle of Adwa—is presently constructed as a commemoration of national identity, since the directive to forget had globally imperiled the moral and ethical images of the state. The same state that had once vilified Menelik II’s legacy is, therefore, currently using the symbolism of the Battle of Adwa as a weapon to secure political control over those who have accused the government of moral blindness with reference to the archives and evidence of history. A constructed enterprise, national memory has always been used selectively to impart a sense of national unity. Apart from their symbolic function, many memorials are also incredible works of art. Bekele conceived his monuments in elaborate styles that were distinctly his own. For instance, the Oromiya Martyrs’ Monument consists of two magnificently upright human bones. Regarding this work, Bekele stated: It was challenging to create this visual object, particularly so when those who commissioned it did not understand my initial visual narrative. I wanted to create a minimal, strongly symbolic and at the same time beautiful and universal piece. One evening, my mother—an Oromifa speaker herself—who came to visit me, repeatedly swore in between our conversations like my father did before he passed away: Lafee Abba Kootii, which is traditionally told to bind a word and a sense of feeling. Its literal translation is: “my father’s bone can come as thorn to pierce my body if I am telling a lie or if I am not correct.” It was at this moment that something struck me. The Oromos and many other Ethiopians confirm their statements by swearing on the bones of their loved ones. And “bone” remained in my mind, a strong conceptual object used in Ethiopia and universal in its longevity.18 Bekele chose the femur, the biggest bone in the human anatomy. He said its structural form looked perfectly humble, with its head leaning down. And in his creation, the two femurs emerge spectacularly aligned with the panorama of the city of Adama. It is 35.55 meters tall at the highest point of the gate that leads to and from the city. The size is deliberately challenged by the use of visually light material, in this case white cement. Although

the ideas behind Bekele’s recent monument works are controversial, he continues to comment on the conflicts and tensions of contemporary life. Later Contemporary Artistic Practices (2010–15): On Development and Subjectivity

Surrounded by massive changes in Addis Ababa that are altering social experiences and cultural geographies, many young artists have been concerned with the urban space and its contested ownership. As I indicated elsewhere, the city of Addis Ababa, once known for its class mix—a place where rich and poor lived in the same neighborhoods—has disintegrated with the growing urbanization and the new and exclusive real estate developments built solely for the upper class. A gradual segregation of classes is occurring. For instance, a minute percentage of citizens who have amassed wealth from leftover donor subsidies have started to live in gated communities, as if to distance themselves from those who are condemned to be subjects of the Ethiopian human tragedy. They have lined street with rows of ostentatious homes that feature gaudy architecture that is both brazen and flamboyant. Their gated mansions resemble a Disneyland in the midst of a massive wasteland of poverty. The visual imagery is surreal. Dehumanized by the spectacle that surrounds them, the poor are besieged by these gated communities and have become spectators observing those who have found joy and power in putting themselves on display. It is crucial to recognize that this intensified income gap and other degrading and dehumanizing aspects of recent development projects have shaped a wide range of artistic interventions. Over the last ten years, artistic voices have interrogated the relationship between state-sponsored development projects and their impact on citizens’ lives. These artists have urgently attempted to address the materiality and meaning of space. Critiquing on different levels, artistic explorations have broadly expressed the popular imagination of development as it occurs in everyday life. In different approaches to engagement that range from photography to video, installations, and urban interventions, they have tried to show how the physical and social context of space can be reshaped, reconsidered, and reimagined to create relationships that are more just and organic. Although numerous artists are currently examining the politics of space, I largely focus on Michael Tsegaye and Berhanu Ashagrie: both artists have coalesced local

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sensibilities with transnational perspectives and raised multilayered queries on belonging vis-à-vis the lived experiences of exclusion. Photography and the Images of Michael Tsegaye

Despite the fact that photography has recently become popular in investigating the changes taking place in Ethiopian cities, artists working in photography are still few in number. Actually, the photograph has been a popular medium since the beginning of the twentieth century. Photography became even more popular in the 1960s when studio photographers captured images that were as telling as portraits and as conventional as passport identification. The intense craze for photography was a remarkable phenomenon throughout the African continent, an outcome of a period of optimism after newly obtained independence. Africa at last considered itself part of the modern world and appropriated photography to mark its belonging in modern culture. Studio photography proliferated throughout the 1960s, and the images of ordinary subjects were often captured by selftaught photographers who subtly punctuated the images with bold background textures, such as flowered carpets. This enthusiasm for the photographic image came to an end in Ethiopia when the military junta took over in 1974. Thereafter, photography was used for propaganda purposes. The role of the photographer as an artist did not evolve until much later, after the Derg. The Alle School of Fine Art and Design had never offered training in the medium, and the contemporary artistic practice of photography had uniquely been conceived by self-taught artists. The recent increase in photographers can also be largely credited to the establishment of the Addis Foto Fest, a biannual photography festival held in the city of Addis Ababa. Founded in 2010 by photographer Aida Muluneh, the festival has introduced international photographers to local artists and has greatly contributed to the recent interest in photography among them. Recognizing that photography can produce different meanings in people’s social and collective memories, artists such as Michael Tsegaye, who is a self-taught photographer, are presently using photography as a social medium of provocation and probing. For instance, at the exhibition entitled Addis Ababa: The Enigma of the “New” and the “Modern,” held at the Modern Art Museum’s Gebre Kristos Desta Center in 2013,19 Michael presented works depicting the changes instigated by state-sponsored development

projects and the corollary realities of actual lives that have been challenged by these changes. Michael started his career in painting but gave up the medium after graduating from the Fine Art School in 2002 when he developed an allergy to oil paint. Abandoning painting altogether, he pursued photography as an amenable medium that could equally extend the ideas and effects perceived in painting. Early on, he began to play on themes such as the street and the social conditions there. But it was when he began to engage critically with urbanism and social space that his direction became clear. His works emerged out of a concern to reclaim the human experience of history that otherwise would not have been recorded in the historical narratives. Watching the change that is rapidly transforming his environment, he has, since 2007, documented the very nature of modern existence in Addis Ababa and its implications in an extraordinary manner. Michael works in black-and-white images that are fluid and dynamic. He says that such images not only are more honest than their color counterparts but also have strong and compelling visual effects. The visual richness of Michael’s images evoke elegance and simplicity, and at times, the viewer mistakes them for stunning charcoal drawings. Michael’s images are critiques of the country’s troubled history in recent times—intended not to lament the rampant poverty and its consequences but rather to highlight the uncertainties generated by shifting situations. In the exhibition Addis Ababa: The Enigma of the “New” and the “Modern,” Michael presented a series of images called Future Memories (Figure 5.6) to question the state’s urgent proclamation of development and ask whether the past was posited in the envisioning of the future: the decree has justified the state’s rampage through the day-to-day lives of ordinary citizens. As I indicated earlier, the country’s current developmental strategy neglects core issues involving the urban poor and the breakup of traditional and indigenous infrastructures. Furthermore, much cultural heritage has been destroyed to give way to new roads and high-rise buildings. Certainly, the imaging of the future relies on memories of the past. Michael asks: “How have we negotiated the past in the development of the future?”20 He believes the deliberate quality of the traditional past that ultimately defines us should be the force that enables us to confront the uncertain advances of development. The question he poses is a most fundamental query that addresses modes of continuity in relation to the cogency of the present.

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Figure 5.6 Michael Tsegaye. Future Memories VII. 2011. Digital print on canson

platine fiber. Courtesy of Michael Tsegaye.

Michael stresses that he does not want to make a claim for authenticity or the rescue of a nostalgic past. Rather, he wants to present the disturbing effects of current postcolonial identity and, in this case, the formation of Ethiopian identity in what the state refers to as Ethiopia’s “rapid modernization” phase. In a set of erratic lines of light stretching back into space, he seizes images of ordinary subjects that are confronted with the city planners’ anxiety for haphazard change and that show the state’s unjustifiable violence in citizens’ lives. Along with the images of ordinary people,

Michael captures old shanty communities sitting next to sites where giant high-rise buildings are being constructed. We see the old and the new, as images of the modern are shown together with the shuffled images of impoverishment and survival. In another series called Chasms of the Soul: A Shattered Witness (Figure 5.7), Michael concentrates on tombstones at the Kidus Yosef Cemetery, where gravesites were demolished to make room for road construction. Families of the deceased who could afford to take the remains of their loved ones to alternate cemeteries were able to dignify the memories of the dead, but many other bodies were just placed in sacks to be buried in mass graves at other sites, denied the remembrance, commemoration, and honor of their personhood. Michael remarks, “I started this project when I heard that the city municipality would be demolishing a section of Kidus Yosef cemetery in Addis to expand the nearby road. It is also the cemetery where my father is buried, so I was interested to see how it would be affected. It was also then that I realized the general state of the cemetery and the condition many of the graves were in.”21 He introduces this series with a quote from the painter and poet Gebre Kristos Desta: “We all need witnesses for our

Figure 5.7 Michael

Tsegaye. Chasms of the Soul: A Shattered Witness III. 2010. Archival digital print. Courtesy of Michael Tsegaye.

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lives—a tombstone, a relative, a keeper of stories.” In his powerful poem “Atsem” (Remains/Bones) (1964), Gebre Kristos Desta wrote: Speak up! as the living are listening Tell me, who will witness your life? Witness, really you need When you are down in the grave Someone who can write on the stone of your tomb Who can build a statue by your grave? That special someone you need Who can witness who you had been So that passersby can stall and find out And admire what you had done before death took you on Gebre Kristos Desta, excerpt from “Atsem” (Translation mine)22 In Chasms of the Soul: A Shattered Witness, Michael insists, just as Gebre Kristos Desta did, on a person’s intrinsic dignity even through death. He condemns the assault committed on the dignity of the deceased as an act that betrays the most legitimate and powerful nature of human normative agency. After all, the deceased once embodied the dignity of humanity in his or her own person. In addition to the violation of the deceased by the trajectory of development, Michael is also disturbed by the havoc surrounding the gravesites, where tombs are vandalized and desecrated in various ways. The chilling images of Chasms of the Soul depict shattered imageries of memory. Photographs of the deceased are either not there as they once were or are just there as fragments of the person who once was. The ruins portray a faded sketch of memory and its original unique narrative, lost in a fragile imagination. Michael explains, “I am struck by the personal sense of damage that these images and the air that falls about them evoke. As a result of time, those buried continue to experience a second death; the gradual deterioration of their entombed identity. The idea I wanted to explore was that of memory. What happens to the deceased when those physical markers erected to keep their memory alive disappear?”23 Provocative and astute in their criticality and alluring in their aesthetic, the works of Michael Tsegaye again center on the rapidly changing nuances of social alteration that his country is facing.

Berhanu Ashagrie

Berhanu Ashagrie, who served as director of the Alle School of Fine Art and Design (2013–16), is best known for his provocative, site-specific projects. His works on disassembled doors are widely recognized (Figure 5.8). By working with doors, Berhanu brings forth visual imageries of memory; the broken rubric of the past is depicted through the doors, and multiple meanings of the enigma of the Ethiopian vernacular surface. Berhanu works on disassembled doors taken from homes that have been demolished to give way to road construction and high-rise buildings; these doors are sold in the open market by people who rummage through the ruins. He paints the doors in various intensities of green as passersby watch. The images of the past emerge from the original doors, as if to remind one of the traces of humanity that once surrounded these doors, refusing to be erased with the initial layers of paint. But each time the doors are painted, their original charm slowly disintegrates, and eventually, with subsequent layers, it gets completely erased. Berhanu says: In my previous projects, I was mainly engaged with spatial orientations in the rapidly changing urban landscape and the visible and invisible benefits and consequences of city spaces / places. I am now trying to go beyond the physicality of spaces and places in the city. Beyond the concrete, I have started to see the level of presence of inhabitants in the city; their emotions, reactions, expectations, beliefs, thoughts, in-and-out through the here-and-now moments of the present. I strongly believe that the form of appearance of cities in any time are mainly about the people embodied within. My recent project attempts to find alternative ways to sustain an ongoing dialogue on the rapidly changing urban landscape and the human conditions in it.24 Berhanu’s site-specific project was conducted at a site called EreBekentu (literally meaning “screaming hopelessly”). Ere-Bekentu once housed the brothels of the city. Just across the street from the former palace of Menelik II, which is currently the home and office of the prime minister, impoverished Ere-Bekentu had for many decades ironically operated alongside state power (perhaps not a notion that many can imagine). With its narrow streets and outdoor indigenous markets, it was ideally invisible

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Figure 5.8 Berhanu Ashagrie. Space, Place, Displacement. 2013. Site-specific

project at Arat Kilo. Courtesy of Berhanu Ashagrie.

and yet adjacent to power; its image read as a double text. It flirted with power by serving the erotic needs of the powerful, while simultaneously magnifying the ongoing suffering of human life. Destitute and impoverished, it amplified the current of the nation’s history. By working in this particular site, Berhanu touched upon the troubling contours of prostitution but also the ongoing effects of dispossession. Large numbers of women who were thrown out of these sites are currently homeless. Their bodies, which were once regulated and brutalized, are once again dehumanized and their lives fundamentally disrupted. They are erased and expunged, utterly invisible; they no longer belong to what is supposed to become the new and modern Addis Ababa. Berhanu graduated from the School of Fine Art and Design in 2005 and received his MFA from Utrecht Graduate School of the Arts in the Netherlands in 2010. It was in Utrecht that he was introduced to Gilles Deleuze’s “becoming of the unbecoming”—the “becoming” meaning the

emergence or the reification of a thing and the “unbecoming” being the drive for making the new where the past and the present are not absolute but are always necessarily shifting. Berhanu stated: My works are based on processes, in which the process becomes as important as the final outcome, which is mostly unpredictable. . . . I am interested in navigating translations of ideas and activities and notions of Social-imagination and the Becoming. My project is concerned with contemporary human conditions in which societies are involved through modernizing activities of cities and its visible and invisible, ecological and spatial dynamics and consequences.25 In an installation called Friendship in Time and Space (Figure 5.9), held in 2011 at the Modern Art Museum’s Gebre Kristos Desta Center, Berhanu filled the gallery space with dismantled pieces of bricks and walls that were characteristic of the visual landscape of present-day Addis Ababa. Pieces of colored glass were curiously interwoven with bricks and other remnants of buildings. Berhanu has said the installation was developed Figure 5.9 Berhanu Ashagrie. Friendship in Time and Space. 2011. Mixed media

work. Courtesy of Berhanu Ashagrie.

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“through my impression and feeling on the city towards the becoming.”26 And by applying spotlights from different directions, he brought forth rays of light that hit the objects of debris at a wide range of angles. How the reflections appeared on the objects was striking. Reflected images from several viewing angles provided a glowing shimmer to the wreckage as they specifically articulated the metaphors of ruins, not as things in themselves but rather as shapes and forms that give rise to multiple meanings and relations. In other words, Berhanu wanted the viewer to experience the historical truth of these ruins within their ethical and aesthetic ambits. In a much broader political and philosophical understanding of the images of ruins, he therefore positioned these demolished fragments in a way that revealed the violence behind their history of decay and destruction. The arrangements of the objects were fascinating, with bricks layered on top of one another and some standing erect and lined up in rows. The light cast on them provided a background of subtle shadows. The aesthetic effect evoked a feeling of nostalgia, and the feeling of exquisiteness was all the more intensified by the feeling of loss. Of this exhibition, Berhanu has said, At some point, I became interested to bring the present character of the city to a white cube. I focused on the dominant elements in which the city is recognized and experienced these days. The project had been going back-andforth from a public space activity to a studio production process and now to a white cube. Through the various activities of the project, I tried to understand the city beyond its formal experience to what the decay really meant.27 Concentrating on the notion of the becoming, Berhanu continues to work on the conceptual complexities of space and place that are always in the process of becoming and the relationship, interface, and divide of space and place. For him, the mapping of particular meanings, practices, and identities onto place characterizes the distinctive togetherness of space and place. Berhanu consequently presents a critical view of present-day Ethiopian subjectivity and the genesis of its social and cultural life. As the director of the Alle School of Fine Art and Design, he has also introduced multiple collaborative projects with global institutions, managing to create a dynamic and engaging artistic environment at the school despite the resistance to change and innovation expressed by the school’s larger faculty.

Other Artists

There are, of course, other artists whose works make multilayered metaphorical queries of the city’s social reality—among many, Mulugeta Gebrekidan,28 Robel Temesgen,29 Eyob Kitaba, Helen Zeru, and Mihret Kebede. The work of Eyob Kitaba is particularly significant in its approach to understanding the current massive disruption of the urban space (Figure 5.10). Waiting for investors to purchase the land, large sections of demolished sites are currently fenced with tin sheet metal that is painted in yellow and green. This permanent defacement is exceptionally visible in the neighborhood of Arat Kilo. There, on one side of the wall is the Sheraton Addis, the emblem of Addis Ababa’s excessive opulence and wealth, and it is always magnificently lit to showcase the luxury it represents. On another side is the National Palace, symbolizing the privileges of power. Ordered by the city administration to abandon their homes, many residents of this Figure 5.10 Eyob Kitaba. Afalgugne. 2017. 90 × 100 cm. Acrylic and graffiti over corrugated iron sheet. Courtesy of Eyob Kitaba.

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particular site, who never had legal permits to reside there even if they had lived there for decades, were neither compensated for their homes nor given alternate places to live. With no social service net to save them, some former residents have put up small plastic tents and still live on the very sites that they are supposed to vacate. Inside the fence, the texture of destruction is scattered everywhere. Such is the current condition that life has granted these people. In a series of works made from green and yellow sheets of corrugated tin that symbolize fenced and bulldozed sites such as Arat Kilo, Eyob portrays the physical disorientation that is felt in the urban landscape of the city. Painted faces of the urban space appear on the tin, with various intensities. Diverse shades of subjectivities emerge from the surface, as if demanding respect and recognition. Eyob is interested in exhibiting the humanity of urban change and its relationship to the state’s alleged moral right to space. Of these images, the artist has said: “The evolution of construction and destruction that is going parallel with the way we physically interact is being compressed over the public space.”30 The aesthetic image of urban ruination is conceptualized in the material and social misery of modern decay that Eyob skillfully represents through these unique illustrations of faces. Equally engaging are Mihret Kebede and Helen Zeru, two female artists who have examined the politics of exclusion particularly as it pertains to gender. The traverse and negotiation between gender and urbanization that these artists have interrogated in recent years is discussed in the section “Women in Contemporary Art.” In Other Themes: The Paintings of Dawit Abebe

In an exhibition held in 2015 at the Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in London, Dawit Abebe presented a series of paintings called Jerba, which means “back” or “background” (Figure 5.11). Dawit graduated from the School of Fine Art and Design in 2001 with a diploma in painting. One of the founders of the Habesha Art Studio,31 he is a prolific painter who has recently won recognition in major global art platforms. Jerba is a series of twenty mixed-media and acrylic paintings of different sizes, and it has a striking Figure 5.11 (opposite) Dawit Abebe. Jerba. 2014. 140 × 200 cm. Acrylic on canvas with collage. Courtesy of Dawit Abebe.

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visual draw. The essence and meaning of the word jerba in Ethiopian oral inscription are equally important in making sense of the multiple meanings of the paintings’ visual conception. In broad metaphorical forms, jerba means the place of Ethiopia in the passage of history, an antipathy to the past as well as to the present that conjures forms of disappointment and indignity, and the significance of the past in arriving at the truth. Jerba has also been used in the political terminologies of different regimes. The term jerbaw yetena (background should be studied) queried the political legitimacy, or lack thereof, of citizens. Particularly used during the Derg regime, jerbaw yetena meant investigating an individual’s past associations to find out whether he or she supported the revolution. In a telling conceptual direction, Dawit’s Jerba series connects multiple points of cultural practices. Thick brushstrokes permeate the canvases, and jerbas, which means the backs of people, of all kinds emerge in different shapes. For instance, a jerba just above the neck is slightly arched with an awkward hat placed on its bold head, evoking in the viewer a sense of everyday life and its discontents. Another panel presents an aged jerba reminding the viewer of the harsh impositions that attend old age. Subtle clues such as a hat, a telephone, and wrinkled underwear present the multiple ways in which Dawit invokes compounded dimensions and imaginations. As Kristin Hjellegjerde observed, Small details—a pair of crumpled shorts, a policeman’s hat, and an old-fashioned red circular-dial telephone—are clues prompting us to put the pieces together and complete each portrait, ultimately becoming an intimate and private glimpse into one man’s life. Yet, in each image, there remains one vital piece missing—leaving us, the eternal voyeur, to never fully connect with our subject—for each man has his back turned to us, facing his ragged shadow, dancing against the wall.32 The viewer dialogues with the materiality of the image, and the eye finds delight in the evocative nature of the composition, texture, and detail of the work. A piece of text is also prominently displayed on the wall facing each portrait, with the painted person seemingly staring at the text. Dawit collected these texts—official government documents from past regimes, correspondences, and diaries—from far and wide. Some were bought from

the open market, and some he simply found. Dawit believes that the superficial paraphernalia of technology has blocked curiosity in examining the past. Technology, he contends, has moved social interactions from the public sphere to a more private domain, and the documents that he incorporates with the paintings, which were once pertinent to probe the past, have become extinct with the use of technology. He has said, I think the history of a country as well as that of a particular individual follow similar paths. One can reflect the other, as microcosm and macrocosm—what affects an individual is often played out on a larger scale when it comes to a national issue. In this vein, I feel that the coming of technology has sent a rapid transformation within Ethiopia, with the danger that the younger generation are becoming less aware of their own history in the face of the pop culture social media interaction that takes up their own attention now instead.33 Though Dawit is concerned with surges in technology and fears that this rise will eventually homogenize knowledge, the production and meaning of the digital world is distant for the vast majority of Ethiopians. Hjellegjerde has written that “Abebe’s interest has lain in the impact these technologies have not only on the environment, but also on human behavior. The most apparent evidence of this, to his eyes, has been the way in which social interaction has begun to move out of the public sphere and into the technological one, through computers and mobile phones.”34 According to the Ethiopian Telecommunication Service, only 2.3 percent of the population use the internet, which means that Ethiopia ranks 199th in internet use among all nations of the world.35 The population is approaching 90 million, making it the second-largest population in Africa. Ethiopia has the second-lowest penetration and the lowest overall teledensity in Africa. The telecommunication sector is solely owned by the government—one of the few monopolies of telecommunication in Africa—and the government has not been receptive to privatizing the sector. Access to computers is scant, and many people use costly internet cafés. Moreover, the state routinely interrupts internet use for surveillance purposes. And then there are the truly unconnected who do not have an online presence at all—in other words, the vast majority who are poverty stricken, who have no clear social representation, and who comprise the

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masses at the base level of society. Any analysis of the Ethiopian digital imaginary should therefore be shaped within this context. For the Ethiopian viewer, Jerba, contrary to what Dawit suggests, poses reflective questions about historical memory and the political and cultural accounts attending to that memory. In a country where development projects in various forms are expunging treasured cultural practices, the Jerba series captures the daily lives of people within the current politics of development and its unsparing attempts to erase the past. Still, Dawit Abebe is one of the few contemporary Ethiopian artists who has been acknowledged for his aesthetically absorbing works and who continues to engage the contemporary moment in its various essentials and contents. Contemporary Women Artists

As indicated elsewhere in this book, women artists have been few in number in Ethiopia, and the understanding and legitimating of women’s art has been a continuous narrative of a hegemonic gaze. Male imagination has historically denied the validity of women’s individual artistic experiences, and women’s works have broadly been denigrated by adjectives such as “warm” and “feminine” and thus deemed insignificant. Art about women in modern and contemporary times has also commonly positioned the female as an object, and the depiction of her body as an art object is troubling as well. She is represented as the quintessential heroine or mother or as the seductress, as innocent or chaste. And this portrayal has unfortunately shaped the images through which many women artists have imagined their own creativity. Countless of them have reappropriated and reconstructed conventional female imaginaries, and the articulation of female sexuality through women’s private sensibilities has been negligible. And so, in a country that does not recognize women’s historical experiences of citizenship, for the few women artists concerned with women’s issues art has recently become a strategic medium for feminist expression. Thus, women artists that I present in this book can be seen as radically subversive and their boldness as compelling acts of resistance against male primacy. More recently, there has been a shift in the study of women, with abundant publications produced and conferences held—but within predominant themes of women as submissive and passive victims of sexual violence. Narratives of resistance are sidelined, and the real causes behind

victimization are obscured by concepts and worldviews that predetermine a degenerate culture that is almost exclusively connected to the victimization of women. Of course, one of the most primary and significant issues of injustice that women are subjected to is the victimization caused by sexual violence. But to equate victimhood with woman, making her eternally the recipient of sympathy, is a deeply rooted myth that reproduces women’s susceptibility rather than challenging the fundamental problems behind sexual violence. The artists I discuss in this section do not see woman as a secondary object, and neither do they cast themselves as victims. In forms of expression that are remarkably different from those of women artists of an earlier generation, Bisrat Shebabaw, Mihret Kebede, and Helen Zeru debunk traditional myths of gender to center women as material historical beings. In the process, they make significant contributions to the largely blank pages of Ethiopian women’s history. Bisrat Shebabaw

As noted in chapter 4, a number of women artists graduated from the School of Fine Art and Design during the 1980s. Many did not pursue their artistic profession after graduation, and the few who continued to work, such as Elizabeth Habte Wold (whom I discussed in chapter 4), left the country to flee the socialist regime. The only significant female artist who remained in the country was Bisrat Shebabaw, who graduated in painting in 1985. Her graduation work, as I discussed in the prior chapter, engaged with women workers and peasants. After her return from the Soviet Union in 1989, Bisrat participated in the official art of the time. But after the fall of the Derg, she began to experiment on different types of works, and her powerful portrayals of women continue to be the most enigmatic of all. In a series of interviews I conducted with her from 2008 to 2010, Bisrat spoke about women who had influenced her life and particularly about her mother, who has played a significant role in her artistic expression. Indeed, most of Bisrat’s works involve images of women. She has said that these images are generally representative of the memories of her mother and others who have been important in her life. She depicts strong women who are seated upright on her canvases wearing beautiful traditional hairdos and others with exaggerated bodily curves (Figure 5.12). Some of the seated women stare directly at the viewer, seeming to confront the viewer’s

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gaze that more often than not has insisted on their subservience and their silence. Their garb is routinely highlighted with bold colors, such as green and red, as if to signify an engaged politics of defiance over the gaze. Highly eroticized, exaggerated images of sexually provocative women also appear in her works as if to uncover forms of female sexuality. These images are painted on gigantic canvases, and through elaborate and elegant bodily curves, Bisrat seems to want to generate fear and fantasy around the female body. In fact, the sexual footings of these paintings demystify the gender myths that surround male languages of art about women. As indicated earlier, women have been represented in contrived compositions that rarely revealed their sexuality—as heroines, mothers, spinsters, or dangerous seductress but never appropriated as erotic figures who unashamedly flaunt their bodies. The fragile apparel that is thrown over a rounded female body is often suggestive and alluring. The beauty that the colors of the cloth evoke and the way the cloth is seductively thrown over the body creates a voyeuristic mood in which the viewer feels that he or she is entering a woman’s private world of sexual pleasure. As one of my male graduate students once said, these women “yehone neger yascheralu” (incite male desire). Bisrat does not consider her work on women as a critique of gender hierarchies, nor does she even look at it through a sexual lens, although her paintings are as much about gender politics as they are about art. The artist has insisted on relating her work to the most mundane and domestic of female symbols, yet her works appear to turn inward into the corporeal self and the cultural bias that underpins its existential grounding. In a country where the silence on female sexuality is deafening, Bisrat deflates the moral politics surrounding the Ethiopian female body. Certainly, the attempt to rupture constructed images of the female has been at the crux of many contemporary African women artists’ enterprises. It is unfortunate that the few visible local women artists such as Bisrat fear the ostracism of the dominant narrative if they should voice opinions on female sexuality. I believe that Bisrat’s works bear her own face and story. The psychic and symbolic contexts of women under masculine primacy are expressed in manifold variations in her works, despite her indifference toward where Figure 5.12 Bisrat Shebabaw. Untitled. 2004. 52 × 22 in. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Yasser Baghersh.

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and how they are revealed. The images of the female body are negotiated between the viewer and the artist—an artist who is a bearer and witness of a culture but also timid about subverting essentialist notions of femininity. Mihret Kebede

A founder and member of Netsa Art Village, Mihret Kebede is one of the few female artists who routinely test the borders of their contemporary environment in the hope of understanding its complexity. Reflecting on a wide variety of subjects, Mihret’s works emerge to address issues of citizenship and the ideological, social, and cultural structures that affect its very nature. Under the auspices of Netsa Art Village, she has worked on various provocative performances that particularly focused on the politics of class and gender. Always interrogative, she innovatively challenges exclusion principally directed toward gender prejudice and inequity. Framing her works around the unheard voices of society and on those considered separate and different, Mihret raises awareness about the political landscape and discursive production of exclusion. In a provocative and audacious installation at the Modern Art Museum’s Gebre Kristos Desta Center in 2011, Mihret used her own menstrual blood to destabilize conventional readings of femininity: I used my own menstruation blood for two years to create an art piece on a diary sketchbook. It took two years because I sketched on the book every twenty-seven days of my period. My artwork in this 40-page diary is the most precious piece that has a very close intimacy with my critical thought as an artist. Not only can you see my expressions of ideas and deep feelings but also my presence in it.36 A mixed-media work, the installation was a kitchen bowl that had a diameter of 4 meters. Titled The Red Diary (Figure 5.13), it consisted of sketches of paper stained with menstrual blood, removed from Mihret’s diary and placed on top of a flowered fabric. Half of the bowl was filled with soil and eggs, the other half with wooden chips and syringes. Mihret receives medicinal injections during her menstrual cycle to relieve severe cramps, and the syringes symbolize her monthly ordeal, whereas the eggs connote fertility. The eggs are placed on parts of the soil to show fertility in

Figure 5.13 Mihret Kebede. The Red Diary. 2011. Mixed-media work. Courtesy of Mihret Kebede.

relation to the barrenness that is represented through the wooden chips. As Susan Gubar wrote in ‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity (2012), “Many women experience their own bodies as the only available medium for their art, with the result that the distance between the woman artist and her art is often radically diminished . . . one of the primary and most resonant metaphors provided by the female body is blood.”37 The markings of the blood also highlight The Red Diary. Mihret urges the viewer to look closer at the female body and its most intimate experience with blood, which more often than not is repulsive and detested in the male imaginary. Despite Ethiopia’s diverse non-Christian culture, the tradition of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has played a major part in shaping the cultural narrative of the country. The combination of church and state was an – indissoluble alliance from the adoption of Christianity by King Eza¯na¯’s in 333 AD until the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. Although no research has been done about women’s historical experiences of citizenship in this larger political narrative, I believe that a close examination of the feminized space, as defined and circumscribed in symbolisms of the

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church, will prove useful to the construction of women’s history. From this perspective, menstruation is one of the many symbols in Orthodox theology that references the curse of the woman. “Whenever a woman has her menstrual period, she will be ceremonially unclean for seven days. Anyone who touches her during that time will be unclean until evening” (Lev. 15:19). The convention of the church is extremely powerful, and the male gaze is omnipresent inside a social imaginary that reveres purity even as it celebrates fertility, a contradiction between the physical mortal female body and the desire for the divine sacred persona. As Mihret has stated, “Using menstruation blood as a medium itself is very controversial in a society that believes this blood is unhygienic, cursed and life less. It is very difficult to be a woman in such a society.”38 Though it is challenging to work as a woman artist in a society where female sexuality is controlled and manipulated, Mihret confronts established assumptions about gender and other exclusions not only through the visual arts but also through poetry. One of the founders of a group of young poets who perform once a month at the Ras Hotel under the name of Tobiya Poetic Jazz, Mihret, along with her colleagues, has managed to create an electrifying platform for poetry and music. With an exceptional knowledge of the Wax and Gold tradition, these young poets—some of whom are also visual artists like Mihret—point to the political and social problems facing their country. Undeterred by fear of the surveillance they are often subjected to, they are audacious in their style of critique, often pressing queries of citizenship that need to be addressed urgently. Despite many threats from state officials to shut down the venue, Tobiya Poetic Jazz has become an important public space where young poets are the voices of dissent against the state’s manifold repression of human rights, property rights, and freedom of expression. Mihret Kebede is one of the few female artists who engage in diverse critical projects that can contribute to larger significant arguments. Helen Zeru

A young and most imaginative contemporary female artist, Helen Zeru graduated in woodcut and in print from the School of Fine Art and Design in 2004. She says she uses her art “as a healing process to deal with very personal issues.”39 Employing concepts and processes that are exceptionally

provocative, unrestrained, and particularly relevant, Helen positions female art in a wide spectrum of approaches and subject matters. The silence that has surrounded male imaginaries of women from ancient Orthodox mythology to current constructions of gender all converge in Helen Zeru’s and Mihret Kebede’s works, perhaps for the first time in Ethiopian art history. In the process, these artists problematize power and subjection, voice and silence, objectification and subjectivity. Blurring the lines between the personal and the political, they have continuously investigated their bodies, inscribing their bodies as inscriptions of history. Predominantly a performance artist, Helen has taken part in performances both at home and abroad, probing issues such as migration, movement, and the havoc wrought on citizens’ rights by recent development projects. In her latest works, she confronts the complex politics surrounding contemporary movements of people, the humanity of people who are moving, and the objectification of their humanity by those who do not move. Particularly focusing on Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees who live in South Africa and Uganda, Helen highlights the politics of xenophobia. She interrogates citizenship and exclusion and also examines the negotiation of displaced memories. For instance, in Guzo (Journey), a public performance held in 2014 at the KLA Art Festival in Kampala, Helen worked with Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees in Uganda. She attempted to recount the stories and tribulations not only of their journeys to Uganda but also of their lived experiences as economic migrants. The refugees are unable to return to Ethiopia because they have denounced the current political structure of their country in order to be granted the political asylum status needed to work and live in Uganda. Using a tree as a metaphor at two different sites in Kampala, Helen uprooted it at one site and replanted it in another. In the empty space where the tree was uprooted, she performed a ritual of incense burning, as if to summon the ancestors for forgiveness and healing. She then spread salt on the cleared land so that it would not be able to grow another tree. Of the tree she planted anew, she said, “I am investigating whether the tree I have planted will find its way back into the soil.”40 Broaching critical questions of memory that center on migration, Helen brought forth the relocation and dislocation of migrants as well as the claim and repudiation of a new space. Often accused of grabbing the jobs and capital of natives,

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Ethiopian migrants have been subjected to violent attacks, particularly in South Africa where the vexing xenophobic politics of exclusion has become a shocking phenomenon in the postapartheid era. Helen made a similar intervention, titled Neither in Nostalgia nor . . . , in 2015 at the Niue National Gallery in Berlin. Of this performance, she said: As a prolonged project of my recent work in Uganda, which touches on issues of migration, movement and frontiers, here in Berlin I am also using trees to represent life, rituals, shade and stillness. Now, on a different setting with similar elements and enquiry I am using my body as a political figure moving the trees in the gallery dragging a 5 meter sack which has the logo of the UNHCR. I myself as a stranger moving from place to place—Addis Ababa, Berlin, Addis Ababa, Kampala—and all the issues I encounter while being on this journey, on borders, visas, Ebola, etc. There is a certain irony in the notion of security which goes hand in hand with fear.41 Again, Helen is confronting her own artistic presence and absence within the politics of fear that is formulaically associated with everything African—disease, terrorism, destitution—particularly so as an African artistic subject who frequently travels. She has endured many humiliations and much harshness to obtain visas, and the stigma of diseases such as Ebola has attached to her presence when she is crossing borders. So deeply ingrained is Africa’s prescribed physiognomy in the Western imaginary that Africa’s erasure and existence is constantly negotiated and re-created, and it is precisely this dual role of erasure and insertion that artists such as Helen confront. One work that has a significant bearing on a personal experience is her 2011 video installation about her deceased mother, called Memory Back and Forth. In this highly stimulating work, Helen invokes death and the indignities faced after death (Figures 5.14a and b). Just like Michael Tsegaye, she had to remove her mother’s remains from Kedus Yosef cemetery before her gravesite was demolished to allow road construction. “This project,” Helen said, “is a very personal experience where I had to deal with time, memory, death, physical change and communication. Removing the bones of my mother from her grave fifteen years after her death and confronting a long gone past was traumatic.”42 In an extremely raw performance, Helen is wrapped up with the customary cloth used for burials (megenezha) to lie

Figure 5.14a and b Helen Zeru. Memory Back and Forth. 2010. Performance. Courtesy of Helen Zeru.

and kneel in the grave where her mother’s bones rested for fifteen years before the state suddenly ordered their exhumation. A wailing sound of grief engulfs the space, and the viewer becomes immersed not only in the agony of death but also in the impoverished image of humanity that has no mercy even for the bodies of the deceased. Interrogating the moral values behind death, Helen invokes the foreboding and shocking experiences of modern life and its violation of the customary anchors of our moral and ethical practices. In this installation, she consequently talks about a present of unresolved pasts, an ambivalent future, and a disorderly contemporaneity that is appropriated and debased.

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Contemporary Ethiopian women artists are playing crucial roles with new genres of work. Despite their small numbers, they are exploring alternative ways to understand their subjectivities, regardless of the political, social, and cultural burdens that continue to frame their humanities. Weaving and blending the personal with the political that also informs universal truth, they are engaged in new formal conceptions that significantly contribute to the experiences of women’s visual culture and, beyond that, to the larger context of contemporary Ethiopian art. Clearly, the particular constellation and essential characteristics from which contemporary Ethiopian art derives and exists are embedded with multiple imaginaries. Despite recent political pressure due to the nature of their works, meager resources, and the inadequate educational and appalling technological infrastructure, artists are beginning to critically explore and question the challenges of their conditions. With artistic production that takes the form of personal, small-scale, and modest extensions that respond to the changing pressures of their environments, artists are foregrounding the vexing disposition of the modern and how it is located, experienced, and translated in different geographies. What is notable, then, is the way in which the artists’ works convey the range of associations, the inequality of relations, and the negotiation with the modern, thereby opening up a larger perspective through which to understand African artists living in the continent. Their demand to be perceived differently also conveys an urge to be recognized within wider imaginative transcultural desires and practices. Departing in significant ways from earlier artistic practices and in compelling vivid imageries, contemporary Ethiopian artists are skilfully capturing the political, cultural, and social unfolding of today’s Ethiopia. This is evident in the originality of recent works that suggest a disruption to conventional forms. And precisely because their works appeal to the contemporary African art platform that connects experiences of diverse transnational projects, these artists can contribute in meaningful ways to larger arguments.

Conclusion

the wars, famine, and wretched poverty that have marked Ethiopia’s history, idealistic linguistic expressions centered around a series of historical concepts, myths, and stories remained central. This is not because famine, poverty, and war were simply accepted as part of the social context, but the nation was always positioned as an overriding good in and of itself. Through much of the 1960s, when dissent over the political status quo was at its height, and even during the gruesome period of the Derg, literature and poetry still handled the subject—the nation—with great chivalry, displaying its countless appeals in a symbolic range. In emotive and affecting expressions, much of the poetry written during these periods, for instance, eulogized the early civilizations of Axum and then conjured a most compelling account of the nation’s modern history: the courageous victory over Italian colonial aggression at the Battle of Adwa, the short-lived occupation by Fascist Italy, and the commendable role Ethiopia played in the African independence struggle against colonialism. Until recently, when the EPRDF turned the public nationalist imagination to notions of development, objectivist and historicist truths rarely described the nation. The mythical had often redeemed indigence and deprivation. The many praise poems celebrating the myths and ideals of the nation were powerful, just as they were beautiful, with each rhyme containing both the literal and the esoteric senses of the words, charting the style of Wax and Gold. All these historical truths that were skillfully coalesced with legends, however, pertained to the histories of northern Ethiopia—the Semitic part of the country—and excluded the rest of Ethiopia from nation and narration. The visual art stories narrated in this book Even through

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speak of these historical conceptions that not only extolled the romance of Ethiopia but also reduced its larger histories. Indeed, the archive of imaginings that constituted the romance of Ethiopia can only be fully captured in the sonnets, elegies, and lyrics of its own language. And whether translations can succeed in accurately communicating the poet’s Wax and Gold metaphors is uncertain, since culturespecific metaphors in Wax and Gold phantasms pose copious challenges; as a result, one is left with only a close reflection of the poem’s connotative meaning. In this situation, therefore, the sensibility and feeling for the values of the language and imagery are significant, as they endow the translation with special characteristics that are gripping, implicit, and textured. I have sought to translate the various poems in this book by studying the words’ broader discursive uses and affective significations. And in so doing, I have attempted to glean from particular poetics the specific cultural traces, histories, and moments. But even though I want to interpret the language closely, the space that mitigates the relationship between the literal and the metaphorical more often than not has been suspended. So much of the material gathered in this book—from the enthralling poems of Arada to the writings of the Berhanena Selam intellectuals, from Yohannes Admassu’s defiant odes of disenchantment to Solomon Deressa’s stunning prose, from Gebre Kristos Desta’s elliptical elegies to Mengistu Lemma’s witty satires—is a rumination on the cultural and intellectual substance of Ethiopian modernism. But it is also a crucial intervention to appreciate the concepts, sensibilities, and worldview behind the visual arts that images alone cannot simply explain. For example, it would have been impossible to reify, translate, and critique the visual arts from the 1960s if not for the repertoires of Amharic novels, poems, and essays that framed the historical moment. Together, they provided insight into the most pivotal period of Ethiopian modernism. In this book, I have assiduously examined the notion that the metaphoric nuances that conjure the images of Ethiopia can be described simply, at a minimum, by speakers of the languages—such as Ge’ez, Tigrinya, Oromifa, and Amharic, among many others—and successfully by those who profoundly comprehend the cultural nuances that are implicit in the language. I have resolutely critiqued the work of Europeans who have written authoritatively about Ethiopian Christian art without speaking or understanding the relevant language, primarily because such works cannot

appropriately situate the cultural values that surround the art object. These writers consider the art object to be the only fundamental source of knowledge. And emptied of the object’s cultural context and consequences, the relationship between artistic subjectivity and practice is compromised. This is a crucial component in the framework of non-Western art. In addition to offering a powerful reading of Ethiopian arts and letters, I also privileged the political and historical conditions in which the visual arts were produced and circulated. In doing so, I sought to draw attention to invented and established historical and cultural categories, as well as the associations they evoke in cultural forms. For example, taking the Battle of Adwa as a frame of reference—considering its historical significance as a point of departure for modernism’s inception—the victory conjured fantasies of invincibility for many Ethiopians, but for countless others, it represented the political, institutional, and social boundaries of Menelik II’s aggression to the south. As a result, the commemorative virtues bestowed upon the emperor and his triumph at Adwa are largely dismissed or scorned by the people of the south. When the EPRDF came to power in 1991 under the rubric of ethnic federalism, it, too, attempted to erase the memories of Adwa, claiming that Menelik II had killed and ravaged the people of the south. These attempts included an effort to remove his monument from the city center in Addis Ababa. But in recent years, the state has reconsidered its earlier view, and the official constructed collective memory of Adwa has reemerged as an African victory that is exceptional and significant. In spite of the state’s political attempts to control and contain the space of difference— the veneration of Menelik II and his victory at Adwa, on one side, and the admonition of his offense in the south, on the other—Adwa’s memory is still contested. And neither the state nor historians have resolved this ironic association between commendation and condemnation, since both parties retreat from genuinely and critically confronting Adwa’s polarities. Italian Ethiopianists such as Alessandro Triulzi have also noted that for Italians, Adwa is a reminder of “the persistent institutional embarrassment in acknowledging the country’s colonial past.”1 Addressing the historiography of Adwa on the occasion of its centenary celebration, Triulzi cautioned that historians “need documents rather than monuments as tools of analysis,”2 and he contended that Adwa brought forth divergent views in the Italian and Ethiopian imaginaries. In this regard, Triulzi urged Ethiopian historians to look beyond the conventional meaning of Adwa and acknowledge its

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ambiguous bequest, not only in Ethiopia, where Adwa’s victory is controversially endorsed, but also in Italy, where different interpretations are given to the meaning of Adwa. As Triulzi noted, the historical past is a continuous “part of present day conflicts,”3 and unless both the insurgent consciousness and the celebratory consciousness are accommodated in nationalist discourse, historiographical representations will be “frozen into historiographical truths.”4 Whether the complexities of historical moments such as Adwa were sufficiently addressed within an objective and inclusive historiography is a question I have tried to examine, since such historiography, or a lack thereof, has shaped our cultural production and its attendant forms. Certainly, the broader malaise in Ethiopian intellectual thought has been its empiricist and Semitic-centered exclusivist mind-set, which rarely reflects comprehensively on the range of historical experiences of Ethiopia and the world. I have looked at the decades spanning the two world wars to understand the rise and advance of modernism. Yet what is most striking in this journey is not only a limited perspective on history but also the notable absence of a narrative addressing the African colonial experience and its shared histories. It is indeed impossible to conceptualize the history of modern Ethiopia without addressing European colonialism and imperialism. Of course, colonial expansion and domination appeared in different forms throughout the country’s history. But the violent realities of indirect colonial rule that have played a major role in producing current Ethiopian history, as well as its multiple materialization, have been largely ignored in the empirical data of the social sciences and the humanities. Reflected also in the visual arts, the maze of contestation in the genealogies of modernism is routinely ignored or dismissed under the pretext that Ethiopia has never been colonized. A central feature that is purported to have marginal significance to Ethiopian historical identity, colonial history has not formed the nation’s intellectual and political thought, which, parenthetically, is dominated by male imagination; nor has it informed the forms and nature of the visual arts because of a common perception that colonialism must be equated with colonial rule. This obviously opens up new and exciting fields of study, on topics such as the complexities of indirect colonial rule, gender, and racial hierarchy—features that have been utterly forgotten in the study of Ethiopian historiography. This book asks whether the stark absence of narratives that pertain to the colonial legacy shaped the making of our present-day identity and alterity that is also reproduced in the visual arts.

I cannot ignore, however, the artistic voices that have interrogated the colonial encounter, in implied and contingent ways, during different periods of modernism’s history. As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, when nationalism’s significance as an ideology and means to confront hostility was pointedly evident, the imaginary bonding between nation and citizen, for instance, did not simply obviate colonial hierarchy but also indicated extreme sensitivity to sovereignty. Precisely because rulers turned their attention to the colonial powers that had overtaken the African continent, they insisted on a nationalist imagination that presented the nation as the sublime figure and that intimated a close analogy between the nation and the divine. In fact, this was declared incontrovertibly valid. Accordingly, Menelik II’s ketet (proclamation of war) for the Battle of Adwa stated: Whoever remains back I will not just leave you alone. I will confront you. In the name of the Virgin Mary, I do not have an intermediary for this. An enemy has come to our country. This enemy is threatening our country that is bordered by water. It is an enemy that will make us convert our religion. My fellow Ethiopians, follow me. I don’t think I have treated you badly. Hence, follow me for your country, your wife, your children and your religion. If you are healthy and are able to fight, help me with your strength. If you have money, help me with your money. If you have neither, health, strength or money, help me with your meditation and prayer. If you decide to do nothing after you have heard this proclamation, I will punish you.5 As the spiritual and moral leader, Menelik II forged a personal and collective identity at the moment of truth, when the nation was faced with the ominous threat of colonial aggression. He referred to the Virgin Mary, who occupies a special place in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church as an intermediary between heaven and earth. When Menelik II said “in the name of the Virgin Mary, I don’t have an intermediary for this,” he implied that even the mediation of Mary, the most impenetrable of all mysteries, could not help those who failed to defend the nation. The Virgin who recognized evil and who took pity on all souls would not have mercy for any form of disrespect to the nation. This way of seeing the nation was necessary to deter the colonial threat. Menelik II’s ketet served to rally and mobilize the wider populace to defend the nation against Italian colonial aggression. And indeed, only ten

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years after the Berlin Conference to partition Africa, the victory at Adwa was a triumphant symbol of resistance against colonial aggression. The Italian colonial project and fantasy gathered force again in the 1930s. It was also around this time that Belachew Yimer painted the battle scene of Adwa and the Solomon and Sheba story. Perhaps it was a mixture of nationalist passion and anxiety about foreign subjugation that compelled Belachew to create such works, and many other artists followed suit, including Tasso Habtewold and Behailu Gebremaryam. Granting that Ethiopian modernism can only be understood within the context of colonial history, I have attempted to comprehend it by looking at artistic creations and structures of representation through corresponding temporalities and relations with and departures from African colonial history. It would be dishonest to argue that there is a complete reluctance among artists and intellectuals to critically engage the effects of the colonial experience and the limits of an empiricist commitment to history. The work of historians such as Shimelis Bonsa and Elleni Centime Zelleke, for instance, has certainly indicated a globally grounded analysis of historicity that speaks to scholars across the humanities and the social sciences. And recently, a young generation of artists has also been interrogating and challenging new forms of coloniality. Most obviously in the context of Addis Ababa’s massive transformation projects, artists have begun to collaborate with other African institutions to correspondingly examine collective African postcolonial political circumstances such as the contested ownership of African urban spaces, urging new inquiries that are keen on addressing the broader perspective of citizenship and space.6 At a time when many African cities are witnessing unparalleled expansion, there is a pressing need to respond to these queries. Once a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla fighting group, the officials in charge of the current state position Ethiopia as indigent and destitute, to the point that development and modernization have become urgent and necessary. And for the state, a pragmatic and efficacious call to nationalism has therefore become obligatory. What has been at stake, nonetheless, is the compulsory erasure of all kinds of memory from the past unless approved by the political body. Today, the distant past is merely recalled, and its continuance is seldom evoked, which is an additional complication of the state’s nationalist call for development. It is difficult to raise a nationalist consciousness when new cultural and economic provisions have brought

about uncompromising change in social infrastructure and where past histories are framed as austere, inconsequential anecdotes. Once a valuable notion to defeat the Italians at the Battle of Adwa, nationalism’s current mobilization plea—not to sovereignty but to modernization and development—has therefore received an ambivalent response, even as the state offers political objectives asserted in terms of the nation. Ironically, a similar plea for seletane, or modernization, was initiated by the Berhanena Selam intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, galvanizing a nationalist fervor to the point that even the underprivileged class unassumingly recognized and believed the larger nationalist reference. Under an absolutist sovereign state that does not believe in representative types of development programs, true participation for a nationalist imagination of economic development has become uncertain, although other forms of nationalism—ethnic and religious, for example—have proliferated. That does not mean, however, that a single and all-embracing shared national identity has ceased to exist. The forms of nationalism that have emerged since the EPRDF took power in 1991 are extremely complex and beyond the scope of this book. However, as I illustrated in chapter 5, the discontent related to political repression and economic deprivation has stirred a backlash against the policies of a state-sponsored development strategy. Interrogating exclusionary notions of development and contesting collective memory and the urban space, Ethiopian artists are proposing practicable and democratic conceptual and aesthetic styles in the African city. In so doing, the artists have not only brought forth a new reading of the African urban space but also critiqued the impacts of the current state’s development policy, its new colonial culture, and its geopolitics of knowledge. Their work has played an important role in influencing the intellectual landscape of Ethiopia. Still, a comprehensive analysis and criticism of colonial discourse and history is crucial—both within the academic infrastructures and in the public sphere. This is needed to question immeasurably complex concepts such as the origins of colonial and capitalist modernity— the flows of capital, labor, and technology that are intimately linked to the state’s current development and modernization conceptions—in addition to forms of knowledge, claims, agency, and identity of postcolonial subjects. There is also the paramount need to work on the formations and subjectivities of gendered identities and the multiple forms and structures that have prevented women from being represented in national identity.

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As an essential point of discussion, the book also envisions Ethiopian artists’ marginal inclusion in the studies of the humanities and the social sciences. Certainly, the lack of cultural history has contributed to the amnesia about artists’ works and even their presence. More books such as Modernist Art in Ethiopia are needed to build a cultural history, to be sure, but the lack of representation of artists in the dialogue of Ethiopian intellectual history has been disconcerting. Even more perplexing is the disregard for art and artists in young and cutting-edge scholars’ works. Here, it is important to note Dagmawi Woubshet’s Calendar of Loss (2015),7 an exciting body of work about race, sexuality, and mourning in the early era of AIDS; in this book, Dagmawi, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, easily textures the paintings of artists such as the South African Trevor Makoba and the British Keith Haring, tying them to the book’s major theme: “mourning and melancholia, poetics and politics, and even the divide between the living and the dead.”8 Dagmawi also works extensively with Ethiopian visual artists to appreciate aesthetic issues and to fathom public narratives and histories related to Ethiopian life. Unfortunately, the works of Ethiopian artists have not shaped or marked the interdisciplinary nature of many other young scholars’ work, and the need to bring Ethiopian artists into the academic realm of the humanities and the social sciences is a matter of great urgency. This book attempts to sound the alarm. The historical marginalization and exclusion of artists and their works outside the spaces of knowledge production—and from categories of the political and theoretical—tends to foreclose a most important space of intellectual debate. This book may be read as a contribution to Ethiopian modern art history and, at the same time, as a key intervention against the claims of mainstream scholarship in Ethiopian history. I have attempted to show the essential moments in modernism’s history by debunking conventional assumptions on the meaning of modernity and modernism to a substantial degree. No one book can account for all of the remarkable features of Ethiopian visual and intellectual culture. But I do hope this volume provides a critical glimpse into artistic movements and their relationship to intellectual thought as well as to national and transnational histories and movements of art.

Notes

Preface 1. Fikru Negash Gebrekidan, “Ethiopia in Black Studies from W. E. B. Du Bois to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,” Northeast African Studies 15, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 1–34. 2. Ibid., 2. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. Introduction 1. Solomon Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” Ethiopian BIR 3, no. 1 (January– February 1997): 20. 2. I interviewed Skunder Boghossian over a span of five years (1996 to 2001), and he frequently referred to the objects that surrounded him as “things that witness their time.” 3. Salah Hassan, “From the Editor,” NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art 15 (Fall–Winter 2001): 13. 4. Walter Migonlo, Coloniality: The Darker Side of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 1, https://www.macba.cat/PDFs/walter_mignolo_ modernologies_eng.pdf. 5. Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1988), 107. 6. Ibid. 7. Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 14. 8. The kingdom of Axum adopted Christianity in the fourth century AD when Saint Frumentius of Tyre (Aba Selamma) converted King Ezana to Christianity. 9. The mass uprising of 1974 ousted the monarchy but was hijacked by a military junta called the Derg, which claimed scientific socialism as its ideology. The

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Derg was ousted in 1991 by the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) party, which currently rules the country. 10. Dagmawi Woubshet, Elizabeth W. Giorgis, and Salamisha Tillet, “The Romance of Ethiopia,” in “Ethiopia: Literature, Art, and Culture,” ed. Dagmawi Woubshet, Elizabeth W. Giorgis, and Salamishah Tillet, special issue, Callaloo 33, no. 1 (2010): 14. 11. Tsegaye Gebremedhin, “Fire or Bloom,” trans. Bahrnegash Bellete, in “Ethiopia: Literature, Art, and Culture,” ed. Dagmawi Woubshet, Elizabeth W. Giorgis, and Salamisha Tillet, special issue, Callaloo 33, no. 1 (2010): 47. 12. The famine of 1973 was first reported by a BBC journalist named Jonathan Dimbleby. Thousands had already died of hunger when Emperor Haile Selassie denied the existence of the famine to the journalist. 13. Human Rights Watch claims the famine of 1984 was in large part created by government policies that focused on anti-insurgent activities such as the war in Eritrea and Somalia rather than programs directed toward food security. 14. Richard Pankhurst, “The Beginnings of Ethiopia’s Modernisation,” Richard Pankhurst: Historical and Cultural Articles on Ethiopia (blog), April 15, 2003, https://richardpankhurst.wordpress.com/2003/04/15/hello-world/. 15. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 57. 16. Bahru Zewde, Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia: The Reformist Intellectuals of the Early Twentieth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002), 9. 17. I am referring to Valentin Mudimbe’s Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Blomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986). 18. Messay Kebede, Survival and Modernization: Ethiopia’s Enigmatic Present; A Philosophical Discourse (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1999), xviii. 19. Ibid., xxii. 20. Ibid., 84. 21. Ibid., 38. 22. Fouad Makki, “Empire and Modernity: Dynastic Centralization and Official Nationalism in Late Imperial Ethiopia,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 24, no. 2 (2011): 266. 23. Andreas Eshete, “Modernity: Its Title to Uniqueness and Its Advent in Ethiopia,” in “Engaging the Image of Art, Culture, and Philosophy,” ed. Elizabeth Wolde Giorgis, special issue, Northeast African Studies Journal 13, no. 1 (2013): 3. 24. Ibid., 11. 25. Donald Donham, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 26. Ibid., 35. 27. Ibid., 12.

28. Andreas Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World,” New German Critique 34, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 189–207. 29. Raymond Williams, “When Was Modernism?” New Left Review 1/175 (May–June 1989): 48. 30. Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review 1/144 (March–April 1984): 96–113. 31. Jules Leroy, Ethiopian Painting in the Late Middle Ages and during the Gondar Dynasty (London: Merlin Press, 1964), 10. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. David Scott, “The Tragic Sensibility of Talal Asad,” in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, ed. David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 134–53. 35. Talal Asad, “Responses,” in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, ed. David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 208. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. Chapter 1: Early to Mid-twentieth-century Modernism (1900–1957) and the Formation of the Fine Art School 1. Andreas Eshete, “Centennial Anniversary of the Battle of Adwa,” speech, African Union, Addis Ababa, June 20, 1995, https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa ?A3=ind9506&L=AFRIK-IT&E=0&P=360915&B=--&T=text%2Fplain. 2. Richard Pankhurst, “The Beginnings of Ethiopia’s Modernisation,” Richard Pankhurst: Historical and Cultural Articles on Ethiopia (blog), April 15, 2003, https://richardpankhurst.wordpress.com/2003/04/15/hello-world/. 3. From November 2015 to February 2016, I hosted a radio program on Sheger 102.1 FM on the role of the intellectuals of Berhanena Selam, and I interviewed historians and literary personalities. This quote is taken from an interview conducted for the program with historian Shimelis Bonsa. 4. Richard Pankhurst, “Some Notes for a History of Ethiopian Secular Art,” Ethiopian Observer 10, no. 1 (1966): 29. 5. Ibid. 6. Lanfranco Ricci, Pittura Etiopica tradizionale (Rome: Istituto Italo-Africano, 1989), 15. 7. Stanislaw Chojnacki, Major Themes in Ethiopian Painting (Wiesbaden, Germany: Franz Steiner, 1983), 32. 8. O. G. S. Crawford, Ethiopian Itineraries, circa 1400–1524 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1958), 40–54. 9. Ibid., 279.

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Notes to Pages 32–41 304

10. Francisco Alvarez, The Prester John of the Indies, vol. 1, A True Relation of the Lands of the Prester John, Being the Narrative of the Portuguese Embassy to Ethiopia in 1520 (Cambridge: Haklyut Society, 1961), 332. 11. Stanislas Chojnacki, “Identification and Dating of Crosses and Alleged Brancaleon Works,” review of the catalog Art of Ethiopia, by Sam Fogg, H-AfrArts: Expressive Cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora (June 2007): 3, https:// www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=13239. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ian Campbell, “A Historical Note on Nicolo Brancaleon: As Revealed by an Iconographic Inscription,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 37, no. 1 (2004): 83. 16. Michelle Clifford, “An Examination of the Methods Used in the Study of Ethiopian Art” (master’s thesis, Michigan State University, 1994), 36. 17. Richard Pankhurst, “The History of Ethiopian Studies: The Haile Selassie First Prize Trust for Ethiopian Studies, 1964–1974,” Addis Tribune, October 11, 2002, 8. 18. Leroy, Ethiopian Painting, 12. 19. Jacques Mercier, Art That Heals: The Image as Medicine in Ethiopia (London: Prestel, 1997), 35. 20. Bahru Zewde, in Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia: The Reformist Intellectuals of the Early Twentieth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002), mentioned Agegenhu Engida as “Ethiopia’s first modern artist” who was educated in France (82). He also referred to Agegenhu when he discussed the cultural alienation of intellectuals. He cited Ladislas Faragos’s derogatory description of Agegenhu’s works, which Faragos called “primitive” Impressionist (198). Bahru also briefly noted that Agegenhu was an Impressionist painter without explaining how this specific classification applied to the artist’s works. Artists were direct products of the intellectual history of the country, but scholars rarely engaged with their ideas or their works in the historical context of the country. 21. Baye Yimam, “Modernity, Language and Identity,” in What Is “Zemenawinet”? Perspectives on Ethiopian Modernity, ed. Elizabeth W. Giorgis (Addis Ababa: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2012), 38. 22. Kidane Wold Kifle, Mesahfe sewsaew wegiss wemezgebe kalat (Addis Ababa: Artistic Printing Press, 1956), 10. 23. In November 2014, I interviewed Gebre Kristos Solomon Belachew, the grandson of Belachew Yimer. He owns a souvenir shop close to where his grandfather owned a shop in the 1930s. 24. Pankhurst, “Some Notes,” 45. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid.

27. Kebra Nagast (The Glory of the Kings) is a fourteenth-century account of the Solomonic dynasty written in Ge’ez. It contains a narrative on how Queen Sheba met King Solomon and how the Ark of the Covenant arrived in Ethiopia through Menelik I, who was Solomon and Sheba’s son. Divided into 117 chapters, the Kebra Nagast concludes with a prophecy that the power of Rome would be dominated by Ethiopia. It is through the writings of Francisco Alvarez, official envoy sent by Emanuel, the king of Portugal, to David, the king of Ethiopia, that the documents first surfaced outside of Ethiopia. 28. Pankhurst, “Some Notes,” 43. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Mahteme Selassie Wolde Meskel, Zekre Neger (Addis Ababa: Artistic Printing Press, 1969), 297. 33. The legend of the Orthodox Church states there was once a village that worshipped the Dragon and made human sacrifices to it. Brutawit was going to be sacrificed for the Dragon when Saint George told her that if she believed in God, she would be saved. When she said she believed, Saint George saved her from the Dragon by killing it. It is said that Brutawit took the dead Dragon to the village to show that God was more powerful than the beast, and then the whole village converted to Christianity. The story of Saint George and the Dragon is a popular theme in Christian Ethiopian paintings. 34. Gebre Kristos Solomon Belachew, interview with the author, November 2014, Addis Ababa. 35. Berhanena Selam, January 1925. 36. Feleke Woldehanna, “Knowledge, Work Ethic and Business,” Berhanena Selam, April 30, 1925. 37. Berhanena Selam, January 4, 1931. 38. Ibid. 39. The Lion of Judah is a widely recognized symbol of the Judaic royal line of David. It is stated in Revelation 5:5, “And one of the elders said unto me, weep not: behold, the lion of the tribe of Juda, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to lose the seven seats thereof.” 40. Officially crowned in Axum, Emperor Yohannes of Tigray reigned from 1872 to 1889. Yohannes was involved in military confrontations with the border territories of northern Ethiopia throughout his reign. He was killed at the Battle of Galabat (also called the Battle of Metema) fighting the Mahdists of the Sudan. 41. Hakim Workeneh Eshete, “Speech on the Inauguration of the Tefferi Mekonnen Elementary School,” Berhanena Selam, May 14, 1925, 77. 42. Fitawrari Deressa Amente, “How to Accept New Things,” Berhanena Selam, June 25, 1925, 103. 305 Notes to Pages 41–52

Notes to Pages 56–74 306

43. Fasil Ghiorgis, “Modernity and Change in Addis Ababa,” in What Is “Zemenawinet”? Perspectives on Ethiopian Modernity, ed. Elizabeth W. Giorgis (Addis Ababa: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2012), 54. 44. Negadras Beshah, “Sele Meretena Sel Ehel,” Berhanena Selam, March, 30, 1926, 88. 45. “Yeketema Wore,” Berhanena Selam, April 26, 1925, 128. 46. Shiferaw Bekele, “Some Notes on the First Art Exhibition (28 October–15 November 1931) of Ethiopia and on the Life of the First Modern Artist (Agegenhu Engida, 1904–1947),” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 40, nos. 1–2 (2007): 127–34. 47. Ibid., 128. 48. Tekle Hawaryat Tekle Mariam, Yeheywete tarik (Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press, 2006), 197. 49. “Theater weyem chewata” (Theater or chewata), Berhanena Selam, March 4, 1926, 71. 50. Merse-Hazen Wolde Qirqos, Yehayagnaw kefele zemen mebacha (Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press, 2009), 285. 51. Zewde, Pioneers of Change, 36, 74. 52. Art critic Seyum Wolde and other artists have said that Agegenhu Engida’s painting called Three Donkeys ridiculed the emperor. The whereabouts of the painting are not known. 53. Seyum Wolde, “Agegenhu Engida,” Yekatit, August 12, 1981, 5. 54. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-colonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 68. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Eshete, “Modernity,” 16. 58. Seyum Wolde, “The Patriot Artist,” Yekatit, (September 10, 1981), 15. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. Messay Kebede, “The Ethiopian Student Movement: A Rejoinder to Bahru Zewde’s ‘The Quest for Socialist Utopia,’” Northeast African Studies 15, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 175–86; and Bahru Zewde, “Response to Messay Kebede’s Rejoinder,” Northeast African Studies Journal 15, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 187–98. 65. Messay Kebede, “The Roots and Fallouts of Haile Selassie’s Education Policy,” UNESCO Forum Occasional Paper no. 10, June 2006, 15, http://unesdoc .unesco.org/images/0014/001473/147348E.pdf. 66. Ibid., 14. 67. Egwale Gebreyohannes, Yekefetegna temehert zeybe (Addis Ababa: Commercial Printing Press, 1965), 20.

68. Bahru Zewde, The Quest for Socialist Utopia: The Ethiopian Student Movement c. 1960–1974 (Melton, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2014), 8. 69. Valentin Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 4–5. 70. Fere Kenafir: Collected Speeches of Emperor Haile Selassie (Addis Ababa: Berhanena Selam Publishers, 1963), 40. Chapter 2: Intellectual Thought of the 1960s 1. Solomon Deressa, Zebet elfitu walolatat (Addis Ababa: Tewanney Studio P.L.C., 1998), 15. 2. Abate Mekuria, interview with the author, multiple dates in 2014, Addis Ababa. Abate Mekuria passed away in March 2016. 3. Tesfaye Gessese, “Acher ye Ethiopia teater tarik kmejemeriaw eske Kebede Mikael,” in Proceedings of the Third International Conference of Ethiopian Studies: Journal of Ethiopian Studies (Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press, 1966), 69–71. 4. Dejach Wube Sefer was named after Empress Zewditu’s second husband, Dejach Wube. It was later named Wube Bereha (Wube Desert)—a place where people lost themselves in the nightlife the neighborhood offered. It was particularly popular in the 1960s, when people from different walks of life congregated there to enjoy the amenities of the area. Besides enjoying the bars, nightclubs, and brothels, people apparently held intellectual discussions at Wube Bereha. Particularly portrayed in Sebhat Gebreegzabher’s novels, Wube Bereha is known as a place where the passion for life is intense. 5. Although most of Gebreegzabher’s works were written in the 1960s, his writings only circulated among his artist and writer friends at the time. They were not accessible to the general public until the 1990s. 6. Sebhat Gebreegzabher, “A Cup of Tea with Skunder” (unpublished article, date unknown). 7. Sebhat Gebreegzabher, “Tesfantastic,” Addis Reporter 1, no. 11 (March 1969): 19. 8. Solomon Deressa and Gedamu Abraha, “The Hyphenated Ethiopian II,” Addis Reporter 1, no. 7 (February 1969): 10. 9. Ibid., 14. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 15. 12. Yonas Admassu, “What Were They Writing about Anyway? Tradition and Modernization in Amharic Literature,” in “Ethiopia: Literature, Art, and Culture,” ed. Dagmawi Woubshet, Salamishah Tillet, and Elizabeth Wolde Giorgis, special issue, Callaloo 33, no. 1 (2010): 76. 13. Getachew Haile, “Talking of the Miniskirt,” Addis Reporter 1, no. 41 (October 1969): 17.

307

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Notes to Pages 86–94 308

14. W. S. Fanta, “Ostrich Legs,” Addis Reporter 1, no. 23 (June 1969): 3. 15. Deressa and Abraha, “Hyphenated Ethiopian II.” 16. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xiv. 17. Tilahun Abbay, “Readers’ Corner,” Addis Reporter 1, no. 9 (February 28, 1969): 4. 18. Akalu Negewo, “Readers’ Corner,” Addis Reporter 1, no. 9 (February 28, 1969): 4. 19. Abera Wolde Tsadik, “Readers’ Corner,” Addis Reporter 1, no. 9 (February 28, 1969): 4. 20. “On Letters,” Addis Reporter 1, no. 9 (February 28, 1969): 4. 21. Ethiopian Ministry of Education, “Ethiopia’s Education System Presented for the International Literacy Day,” September 2011, https://www.brookings.edu /wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Ethiopia_Fuad_Ibrahim.pdf. 22. Admassu, “What Were They Writing about Anyway?” 64. 23. Solomon Deressa, “The Amharic Dime Novel,” Addis Reporter 1, no. 1 (January 1969): 17. 24. Solomon Deressa and Gedamu Abraha, “Non Sequitur,” Addis Reporter 1, no. 27 (July 1969): 14–19. 25. Deressa, Zebet elfitu walolatat, 32. 26. Eritrea was captured by Britain from Italy in 1941. And on October 7, 1951, the UN commissioner for Eritrea announced that Eritreans had accepted a UN plan for federation with Ethiopia. The Eritrean Federation, between the Ethiopian empire and Eritrea, was established in 1952. It was created through the auspices of the Federal Act in Ethiopia and the Eritrean Constitution of September 15, 1952. But the federal structure came to an end in 1962 following pressure from Emperor Haile Selassie on the Eritrean Assembly. The federation was dissolved, and Eritrea was annexed by Ethiopia in 1962. 27. Fikru Negash Gebrekidan, “From Periphery to Center: Ethiopia and the Politics of Pan-Africanism, 1863–1963” (paper presented at the “Imaging Ethiopia” conference, Cornell University Africana Studies and Research Center and the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, May 2009). 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Andreas Eshete, “Commemoration to Mark the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of the Organization of African Unity and the Contribution of Emperor Haile Selassie to Its Establishment” (speech at the African Union, Addis Ababa, August 5, 2013). 33. Ali Mazrui, “Images of Ethiopian Religion, Politics and Culture: From the Muezzin Bilal to the Opera Aida” (paper presented at the “Imaging Ethiopia” conference, Cornell University Africana Studies and Research Center and the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, May 2009).

34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Gebrekidan, “From Periphery to Center.” 38. Seyum Haregot, The Bureaucratic Empire: Serving Emperor Haile Selassie (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 2013), 103. 39. Ibid., 104. 40. Ibid. 41. Berhane Meskel Redda, Yonas Admassu, Getachew Haile, Amsalu Aklilu, and Dagnachew Worku, eds., Endih new: ye university college yetsne tsehuf mesehet (1965). This pamphlet-like publication was printed with photocopy machines and distributed to university students on campus. The collection, which is archived in the Institute of Ethiopian Studies library, is not complete. Nonetheless, many of the essays in this important collection of early writings by students were critiques on issues such as the shortcomings of modern education and poverty as well as questions of equality and justice. 42. Plays such as Ha hu besedest wer and Ha hu ena pepu were written during the early period of the Derg in support of the revolution. 43. Tsegaye Gebremedhin, “Literature and the African Public,” Ethiopian Observer 11, no. 1 (1967): 63. 44. Ibid., 64. 45. Ibid., 65. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 66. 48. Ibid., 67. 49. Kifle Wodajo, “Pan Africanism and the Evolution of an Idea,” Ethiopian Observer 8, no. 2 (1964): 166. 50. Eshete, “Modernity,” 13. 51. Ibid. 52. In 1972, Walelign Mekonnen and five other militant colleagues attempted to hijack an Ethiopian Airlines flight to Europe to protest the imprisonment of colleagues. Ethiopian security forces that were on the same flight shot and killed five of the hijackers, including Walelign Mekonnen. 53. Vladimir I. Lenin, “Theses on the National Question,” in Lenin: Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1913), Lenin internet archive, 2004, https:// www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/jun/30.htm. 54. Walelign Mekonnen, “The National Question,” Struggle 5, no. 2 (November 17, 1969). 55. Ibid. 56. Mengistu Lemma, “Basha Ashebir in America,” trans. Bahrnegash Bellete, in “Ethiopia: Literature, Art, and Culture,” ed. Dagmawi Woubshet, Salamishah Tillet, and Elizabeth Wolde Giorgis, special issue, Callaloo 33, no. 1 (2010): 38.

309

Notes to Pages 94–105

Notes to Pages 106–126 310

57. Being from northern Ethiopia, Mengistu Lemma was talking about the purity of the northern Ethiopian race, which purportedly descended from kings and queens and, moreover, from the citadels of the Solomonic dynasty, which attributes its origin to Solomon and Sheba. Basha Ashebir was aggravated with those who were trying to demean the virtues of the dynasty. 58. Mengistu Lemma, Yegetem gubae (Addis Ababa: Artistic Printing Press, 1968), 54. 59. Ibid. 60. These studies include, among many others, Alessandro Triulzi and Tessema Ta’a, in Yewelega yetarik senedoch ke 1880 eske 1920 (Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press, 2003); Abbas Gnamo, in Conquest and Resistance in the Ethiopian Empire, 1880–1974 (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Asafa Jalata, in Fighting against the Injustice of the State and Globalization: Comparing the African American and Oromo (New York: Palgrave, 2001); and Timothy Derek Fernyhough, in Serfs, Slaves and Shifta: Modes of Production and Resistance in Pre-revolutionary Ethiopia (Addis Ababa: Shama Books, 2010). 61. Belete Belachew Yihun, “Ethiopia in African Politics: 1956–1991” (PhD diss., Addis Ababa University, 2012). 62. Dagnachew Worku, Adefres (Addis Ababa: Artistic Printing Press, 1955), 32. 63. Ibid., 45. 64. Bealu Girma, KeAdmas bashager (Addis Ababa: Artistic Printing Press, 1961), 69. 65. Ibid., 75. 66. Ibid., 84. 67. Yohannes Admassu, Este teteyeku (Addis Ababa: Commercial Printing Press, 1962), 25. 68. Ibid., 38. 69. Poet, playwright, author, and erudite church scholar Yoftahe Negussie had written several books. He is the first playwright in Ethiopia and widely known for his play Afageshgn, which focused on the nation before and during the Italian occupation. Chapter 3: The Modernists of the 1960s 1. Gebre Kristos Desta, “Menged Seteugn Sefi,” in Collected Poems of Gebre Kristos Desta, ed. Yonas Admassu and Heran Serekeberhan (Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press, 2006), 28. 2. Acahamyeleh Debela, “Gebre Kristos Desta: Ethiopia’s Painter and Poet Extraordinaire,” in Gebre Kristos Desta: The Painter-Poet, ed. Elizabeth W. Giorgis and Yonas Admassu (Frankfurt: Engelhardt and Bauer, 2006), 11. 3. Desta Hagos, interview with the author, December 2014, Addis Ababa. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid.

6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Notes that were written by Gebre Kristos Desta were collected from his home and given to the Institute of Ethiopian Studies by his cousin Yohannes Seife after Gebre Kristos’s death. These notes are currently archived in the IES library. They are actually bits and pieces of notes as well as fragmented photographs. I took this statement of the “tella” tin can from one of these notes, archived under “Unpublished Manuscripts,” accession no. 2418. 9. Elizabeth Biasio, “Gebre Kristos Desta Reflected by His Former Students,” in Gebre Kristos Desta: The Painter-Poet, ed. Elizabeth W. Giorgis and Yonas Admassu (Frankfurt: Engelhardt and Bauer, 2006), 67. 10. Ibid. 11. Debela, “Gebre Kristos Desta,” 13. 12. Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” in Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 258. 13. Gebre Kristos Desta, notes archived under “Unpublished Manuscripts,” ES library, accession no. 2418. 14. Debela, “Gebre Kristos Desta,” 13. 15. A prominent journalist of the period, Mulugeta Lule is known to have chastised the works of Gebre Kristos in writings that appeared in the major newspaper of the time, Addis Zemen (1941–74), although I did not find the original material. The Addis Zemen collection is not digitized at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies or at the National Archives, where it is housed. However, it is evident that such writings existed, since Gebre Kristos, both in published and unpublished materials, responded to the accusations. Solomon Deressa responded to such accusations as well. I have also interviewed playwright Abate Mekuria and others from the period who affirmed Mulugeta Lule’s criticisms of Gebre Kristos’s work in Addis Zemen. 16. Debela, “Gebre Kristos Desta,” 13–14. 17. Heran Sereke-Berhan, “Gebre Kristos Desta: The Painter’s Eye, the Poet’s Hand,” in Gebre Kristos Desta: The Painter-Poet, ed. Elizabeth W. Giorgis and Yonas Admassu (Frankfurt: Engelhardt and Bauer, 2006), 88. 18. Debela, “Gebre Kristos Desta,” 15. 19. Phenomenal Objects, catalog for the exhibition of Skunder Boghossian’s works at Howard University, curated by Tretoria Benjamin, September 1981. 20. Skunder Boghossian: Spaces, exhibition catalog, Trisolini Gallery of Ohio University, 1980. 21. Susan Buck-Morss, “Seeing Global,” http://susanbuckmorss.info/text/seeing -global/. 22. Known for its monolithic stone churches, Lalibela is one of Ethiopia’s holiest sites. Built in the thirteenth century by King Lalibela, it consists of eleven monolithic, rock-hewn churches. It was initially constructed to resemble the Holy

311

Notes to Pages 126–137

Notes to Pages 137–139 312

Land of Jerusalem. A spectacular site for tourists, Lalibela is currently under UNESCO’s World Heritage Earthen Architecture Programme. 23. Gondar served as the capital of the Ethiopian empire around 1635, during the reign of Emperor Fasiledes. The city holds the remains of several royal castles, including those in Fasil Ghebi (the Royal Enclosure) from which the emperors reigned. Near the city lies the Fasiledes Bath, where the annual Temket (Epiphany) ceremony is conducted. 24. Harar is a walled city in eastern Ethiopia. It was a fiercely religious and forbidden city (closed to visitors) until 1887 when Menelik II restored central rule. With its eighty-two mosques, including the sixteenth-century Grand Mosque that has beautiful twin towers and a slender minaret, it is considered to be the fourth most holy city in Islam. Harar is known to have been a major commercial center linked by trade routes that connected Ethiopia, the entire Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and through its ports the outside world. Harar was included in the 2006 UNESCO World Heritage site list. 25. Debteras are part of the clergy who are particularly trained as scribes and cantors. Although they are erudite in the liturgies of the church, they are unordained and are not well respected by members of the clergy because of their roles as fortune– tellers and scribes. Debteras are particularly known for their amulets, in which scrolls of illuminated parchment of Christian and non-Christian text are inscribed. People who are inflicted with illness wear these amulets around the neck as treatment for their maladies. For accounts of the art of the debtera, see Mercier, Art That Heals. 26. The zar is also performed in other Middle Eastern countries, but it is believed to have originated in Ethiopia. Ethiopian slaves are thought to have taken the zar to Egypt. The zar is a spirit that possesses a person and prompts the possessed to go into a trancelike state. Though no one is exempt from being possessed by the zar, it is females who are usually possessed. Having its own rhythm, the trance typical involves a rolling of the head. 27. In Ethiopia, it is traditionally believed that every blacksmith is a wizard with the power to change into a hyena and then resume human shape at dawn. Boudas allegedly rob graves at midnight. Many Ethiopian Christians characterize Ethiopian Jews as boudas. They say Jews unearth Christian corpses and devour them. Ethiopian Jews, also called Falashas, have worked as blacksmiths and consequently are associated with the bouda. 28. Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” 17. 29. Valentin Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa: African Systems of Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 4. 30. Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” 17. 31. Ibid., 24. 32. Ibid., 20. 33. “Kind of Blue” is Miles Davis’s classical piece and the title of his best-selling album. Familiar to many people, it is Davis’s masterpiece and often described as

jazz’s greatest record. “Bitches Brew,” by contrast, is a sophisticated composition that experiments with electric instruments. The eponymous album is widely believed to have rejected traditional jazz rhythms in favor of rock-influenced improvisational style. For traditional jazz lovers, “Bitches Brew” may seem unconventional. Skunder thought “Kind of Blue” was conventional jazz whereas “Bitches Brew” required a more refined taste in jazz. 34. From my conversation with Skunder Boghossian, April 1998, Washington, DC. 35. Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” 19. 36. From my conversation with Skunder Boghossian, June 1999, Washington, DC. 37. Okwui Enwezor, introduction to The Short Century: Liberation and Independence Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2001), 10–17. 38. Ibid., 1. 39. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Vintage/Library of America, 1990), 16. 40. Buck-Morss, “Seeing Global.” 41. Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” 20. 42. From my conversation with Skunder Boghossian, February 1997, Washington, DC. 43. Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” 20. 44. Kifle Biseat (Skunder’s colleague and friend in Paris), interview with author, December 2008, Addis Ababa. 45. Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1989). 46. Richard Greenfield, Ethiopia: A New Political History (London: Pall Mall Press, 1969), 25. 47. Chris Beckett, “Ethiopia to Alioune Diop,” MPT Magazine, no. 2 (2013), http://www.mptmagazine.com/author/chris-beckett-2754/. 48. Biseat interview. 49. Richard Powell, Black Art: A Cultural History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 74. 50. Solomon Deressa, “Skunder: In Retrospect Precociously,” Ethiopian Observer 10, no. 3 (January 1965). 51. Ibid. 52. Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” 22. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 65. 56. Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” 27. 57. Skunder Boghossian’s Juju’s Wedding, in tempera and metallic paint on cut and torn cardboard, measures 53.6 cm × 50.7 cm and is currently owned by

313

Notes to Pages 139–149

Notes to Pages 149–162 314

the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA); it can be accessed through MoMA’s website: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/34030. 58. Mercier, Art That Heals, 94. 59. Deressa, “Skunder: In Retrospect Precociously,” 175. 60. Hateraw is an Oromo word (Oromo is another dominant dialect besides the working language, Amharic) and usually alludes to profanity. In Skunder’s canvases, however, the word is used playfully and is generally characterized as parody. 61. From my conversation with Skunder Boghossian, April 1998, Washington, DC. 62. In Major Themes, Chojnacki referred to changes in style after Gran’s invasion. However, he did not elucidate where the changes occurred or what the changes were. 63. From my conversation with Skunder Boghossian, April 1998, Washington, DC. 64. Abdelrahman Sheriff, interview with the author, November 2008, Addis Ababa. 65. The shemane loom is a wooden weaving loom that is used to make the cotton garb (the shama) that Ethiopians traditionally use as their main attire. Skunder Boghossian started using the loom when he returned from Paris; he painted the magical scrolls on these looms. Zerihun Yetimgeta, one of Skunder’s students in the Fine Art School, was heavily influenced by Skunder, and he continues to predominantly use the shemane loom in his works. 66. Deressa, “Skunder: In Retrospect Precociously.” 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. With Cuban Spanish, Chinese, and African origins, Wilfredo Lam drew inspiration from his own multiethnic cultural heritage. Known for challenging the dominant conception of African “primitivism,” Lam combined the elements of myth that were inspired by African spiritual origins and totemism. His most acknowledged work, The Jungle, marks this particular style. 70. Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” 21. 71. Brenda Cooper, Magical Realism in West African Fiction (London: Taylor and Francis Group, 2003). 72. Mercier, Art That Heals, 79. 73. A. Purpura, “Writing Memory: The Art of Wosene Worke Kosrof,” in Words: From Spoken to Seen—The Art of Wosene Worke Kosrof, ed. A. Purpura and B. Martinez-Ruiz (San Jose: Mexican Heritage Corporation, 2006), 12. 74. Tadesse Mesfin, interview with the author, February 13, 2008, Addis Ababa. 75. Salah Hassan, “Skunder Boghossian,” in To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities, ed. Richard Powell and J. Reynolds (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 45–50. 76. Quoted from a press release by the Studio Museum of Harlem in 1972 on the occasion of an exhibition of Skunder Boghossian’s works, which was curated by Rosalind Jeffries.

77. Gossa Gebre Selassie, “Skunderian Dictums, Questions, Aphorisms, Conversations,” in “A Tribute to Skunder Boghossian and Gebre Kristos Desta,” ed. Shiferaw Bekele, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 37, no. 1 (2004): 162. 78. Bob Marley, “Redemption Song.” From the album Uprising recorded in 1980. 79. Elizabeth Harney, “The Poetics of Diaspora,” in Ethiopian Passages: Contemporary Art from the Diaspora, ed. Elizabeth Harney (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2003), 17. 80. Rasheed Araeen, “A New Beginning: Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Politics,” in The Third Text Reader, ed. Rasheed Araeen, Sean Cubitt, and Ziauddin Sardar (London: Continuum, 2002), 334. 81. Ibid., 334–35. 82. Skunder could have gone back to Ethiopia if he had wanted to—in fact, he had attempted to do just that more than once. On one of his attempts, I had planned to accompany him, but he chose not to return for fear that he would not remain sober and that people would judge his addiction and ultimately lose respect for him. 83. Biasio, “Gebre Kristos Desta,” 66. 84. Tadesse Mesfin interview. 85. Zerihun Yetimgeta, interview with the author, November 2014, Addis Ababa. 86. Ibid. 87. Tadesse Mesfin interview. 88. A German national whose real name was Karl Heinz Hansen, Bahia emigrated to Brazil in 1949. He lived in Salvador da Bahia, where he was involved in creating woodcuts and murals for churches. In the 1950s, the Brazilian writer Jorge Amado called him “a tribute to Bahia,” and ever since then, he has been known as Hansen Bahia. He arrived in Ethiopia in the early 1960s and taught at the Fine Art School. 89. Zerihun Yetimgeta interview. 90. Ibid. 91. Ibid. 92. Belete Gebre, Be’edme godana lay yeguzo tizita (Addis Ababa: Central Printing Press, 2012), 90. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid. 95. Dagnachew Worku, Adefres, 45. 96. Desta Hagos interview. 97. Azmari bets mean “azmari houses,” and azmaris are singers who are known for the sense of humor in their lyrics; the humor is usually embedded in multilayered meanings and is improvised to their customers. The lyrics of the azmari usually refer to social and political issues. 98. Desta Hagos interview. 99. Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 164–181

Notes to Pages 181–198 316

100. Eshete, “Modernity,” 15. 101. I took this quote from an unpublished poem by Tsegaye Gebremedhin, which is widely circulated in literary circles. It was written after Gebre Kristos Desta’s death but was never published in any of Tsegaye Gebremedhin’s printed works. 102. Chika Okeke upon the death of Skunder Boghossian. Chapter 4: Enat Hager Weym Mot (Revolutionary Motherland or Death) 1. Between November 1977 and mid-1978, the military junta launched what is called the Red Terror, supposedly to wipe out reactionaries who were detrimental to the revolution. This onslaught was mainly aimed at the EPRP, which was gaining momentum in guerrilla warfare against the military regime both in the countryside and in the urban areas. The Red Terror saw the massacre of many young activists who were suspected of being EPRP members. Amnesty International estimates that the death toll may have exceeded thirty thousand. Groups of people were herded into churches that were then burned down, and women were subjected to systematic rape by soldiers. 2. Seyum Wolde, “Ye Ethiopia mehurna ena yetarikna yesene lebona teyakewoch,” Yekatit, February 1974, 17. 3. Michael S. Serill, “Why Are the Ethiopians Starving Again? What Should the World Do and Not Do?” Time, December 21, 1987, 22. 4. Ibid. 5. Debebe Seifu, Book of Poetry (Addis Ababa: Kuraz Printing Press, 1986), 25. 6. Dessalegn Rahmato, “Art Betrayed,” Challenge 5, no. 2 (1965): 19. 7. Afework Tekle, “Kine tebeb: Kale meteyek keseali Afewerk Tekle,” interview, Goh 2, no. 2 (January 1976). 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Michael Tebebu, “Letter to the Editor,” Goh 2, no. 3 (February 1976): 4. 11. Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic, February 2016, http://classics.paradoxoftheday.com/arendt-on-violence/. 12. Ibid. 13. “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” (Psalm 68:31). “And there came out against them Zerah the Ethiopian with an host of a thousand, and three hundred chariots; and came unto Mareshah” (Chron. 14:9). “[Are] ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? saith the Lord. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt? And the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir?” (Amos 9:7). “And the sons of Cush; Seba, and Havilah, and Sabta, and Raamah, and Sabtecha. And the sons of Raamah; Sheba, and Dedan” (Chron. 1:9). 14. Ethiopia was mentioned by Homer in both The Iliad and The Odyssey. Homer told the story of the Ethiopian king Memnon, who in Greek mythology

was the son of Tithonus and Eros. Memnon was a warrior who was a contemporary of Achilles. The Greek historian Herodotus said Memnon traveled to the Nile and said Ethiopia was located to the south of Egypt. He spoke of Meroe as the capital and also mentioned Memnon. 15. Prester John was the name given to a mythical medieval Christian priestking of a vast empire in Central Asia and later in Ethiopia. According to Enrico Cerulli—the Ethiopianist who wrote several scholarly works on Ethiopia and is best known for his book Storia Ethiopia—in the Mirabilia Descripta, which was written in 1329 by the Dominican friar Jourdain Catalani, Prester John was described as the sovereign of Christian Ethiopia. And thereafter, the legend of Prester John flourished as the ruler of a kingdom located in Africa and particularly Ethiopia. The History of Rasselas: Prince of Abyssinia is an apologue of happiness by the author Samuel Johnson. 16. Arendt, “On Violence.” 17. Andreas Eshete, “Commemoration to Mark the Fiftieth Anniversary of the ‘Land to the Tiller’ Demand Made by the Students of Haile Selassie I University” (speech at the “Ethiopian Student Movement: Intergeneration Debate” conference, Addis Ababa, March 23, 2015). 18. Esseye Gebremedhin, interview with author, November 2014, Addis Ababa, and Tadesse Mesfin interview. 19. Tsegaye Gebremedhin, “Kine tebeb: Kale meteyek ke Ato Tsegaye Gebremedhin gar,” interview, Goh 1, no. 10 (September 1975). 20. Tsegaye Gebremedhin interview. 21. Eshete, “Commemoration.” 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Abdelrahman Sheriff, interview with the author, March 2009, Addis Ababa. 25. Ibid. 26. Abdelrahman Sheriff, “Contemporary Ethiopian Art at Cross Roads” (paper presented in a lecture at the German Cultural Institute, Addis Ababa, October 2005). 27. Abdelrahman Sheriff interview. 28. Geta Mekonnen, interview with the author, November 2009, Addis Ababa. 29. Tadesse Mesfin interview and Esseye Gebremedin interview. 30. Ibid. 31. This quote is taken from the Central Committee of the Workers Party of Ethiopia’s pamphlet Meskerem, which was published once a month. Its heading stated that it was a Marxist-Leninist “ideological magazine.” It primarily laid out the organizing principles of Marxist-Leninist thought in the areas of culture and political economy. This particular statement was quoted from a section called “Kine tebebna reeyote alem beethiopia abyot hidet,” Meskerem 3, no. 1 (December 1982): 22–26.

317

Notes to Pages 198–210

Notes to Pages 212–219 318

32. Aleme Eshete, The Cultural Situation in Socialist Ethiopia (Paris: UNESCO, 1982), 28. 33. The Gold Mercury International Award is organized by Gold Mercury International, an international nongovernmental organization. Awards are given to prominent individuals who have contributed to world peace, good governance, and global commerce. Colonel Mengistu gave this award to many individuals who were believed to have promoted the revolutionary goals and ideals of the Derg. 34. Richard Pankhurst, Afewerk Tekle (Addis Ababa: Commercial Printing Press, 1988), 10. 35. One example is the mural in the lobby of St. Paul’s Hospital, which I discussed in chapter 1. In this mural, finished in 1970, Afework Tekle depicted the emperor, the hospital’s original patron, in a magnanimous way, looking down at his subjects. 36. In my conversation with Tadesse Belayneh in May 2015, he said he did not remember much about the mural and was hesitant to talk about it, although he was one of the major sculptors who participated in the project. 37. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 19. 38. Esseye Gebremedhin, Proceedings of the Yekinetebebat Seminar, archived at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies under “Unpublished Work” (1989), accession no. 14893. 39. Mengistu officially began his campaign with a speech in Revolution Square that included the words “Death to counterrevolutionaries and death to the EPRP.” He produced three bottles of what appeared to be blood and smashed them to the ground to show what the revolution would do to its enemies. A massive house-byhouse search for EPRP members was conducted. Thousands of men and women were rounded up and executed in what is called the Red Terror. The Derg thereafter consolidated its power and worked intensively at destroying its opponents, particularly members of the EPRP. 40. Mengistu Lemma, Proceedings of the Yekinetebebat Seminar. 41. Seyum Wolde, Fundamental Marxist Principles of Art: Concise Rules for Socialist Art (Addis Ababa: printed by author, 1980), 15. 42. Department of Ideology of the Central Committee of the Workers Party, “The Theoretical Conception of Culture,” Meskerem 2, no. 7 (December 1981): 89. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Semeneh Betreyohannes, “Music and Politics in 20th Century Ethiopia: Empire, Modernization and Revolution” (master’s thesis, Addis Ababa University, Institute of Ethiopian Studies, 2008), 72. 46. Ibid., 77. 47. The Red Star Campaign was the Derg’s largest military offensive against Eritrean secessionist forces. On January 25, 1982, Mengistu Hailemariam launched

the campaign by giving a speech in Asmara calling for the elimination of the Eritrean “secessionist bandits.” The campaign also included a plan to organize peasants by providing them with military training and arms to defend Eritrea. 48. Bealu Girma, Oromay (Addis Ababa: Commercial Printing Press, 1983). 49. Ibid., 371. 50. An additional wing that commemorates Cuban soldiers was added to the statue after the EPRDF rose to power. 51. Department of Ideology of the Central Committee of the Workers Party, “Art and Ideology in the Process of the Ethiopian Revolution,” Meskerem 3, no. 11 (1982): 38. 52. Ibid. 53. Esseye Gebremedhin interview. 54. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 1. 55. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto (New York: Prometheus, 1988), 77. 56. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde: Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond (London: Verso, 2011). 57. Geta Mekonnen, “Beauty and the Beast: Art and Dictatorship in Socialist Ethiopia, 1974–1991,” in Continuity and Change: Three Generations of Ethiopian Artists, ed. Rebecca Nagy (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 35. 58. These schools are known for teaching traditional academic art. As recently as 2015, they were said to be producing technically skilled (traditional) artists, but apparently they do not engage in experimental works. 59. Bekele Mekonnen, interview with the author, December 2014, Addis Ababa. 60. Mekonnen, “Beauty and the Beast,” 33. 61. Wolde, Fundamental Marxist Principles, 15. 62. Ibid., 34. 63. Emperor Tewodros II was emperor of Ethiopia from 1855 until his death in 1868. Mostly known for his ambition to establish a cohesive state, Tewodros II ended the decentralized status quo of the Zemene Mesafint (the era of the princes). He moved the capital of the empire from Gonder to Maqdala. Fearful of the Muslim powers that surrounded Ethiopia, Tewodros wrote a letter to Queen Victoria of England asking for her assistance—technical and military—in the region. The letter was given to Captain Charles Duncan Cameron, the British consul in Ethiopia. He did not deliver the letter, since he was instructed by the foreign consul to send it to the queen instead of delivering it himself. Cameron had traveled to the coast with the letter when the Foreign Office instructed him to proceed to the Sudan to make inquiries about the Sudanese slave trade. Tewodros was enraged by Cameron’s actions and also felt betrayed by his travels to Muslim countries. When, after two years, Tewodros had not received a reply from the queen, he imprisoned Cameron and other Europeans to get the queen’s attention.

319

Notes to Pages 219–229

Notes to Pages 229–245 320

The British sent a mission along with a reply from the queen. But the reply did not come with the assistance that Tewodros had requested, so he imprisoned the mission. The British sent a military force to Maqdala, killing most of Tewodros’s men. The emperor committed suicide on Easter Monday, April 13, 1868. His actions and belligerence toward the British are applauded by Ethiopians. Considered a hero, Tewodros is also praised for his efforts to unite Ethiopia by crushing the Zemene Mesafint. 64. Alessandro Triulzi, “Across the Mediterranean: Acknowledging Voices and Silences of Post-colonial Italy,” in Colonialism and National Identity, ed. Paolo Bertella Farnetti and Cecilia Dau Novelli (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 171. 65. Ibid., 172. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Behailu Bezabih, interview with the author, March 2012, Addis Ababa. 70. Achille Mbembe, On the Post Colony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Emphasis on the section “Aesthetics of Vulgarity.” I am emphasizing the chapter called “The Aesthetics of Vulgarity,” 102–42. I am particularly referring to pages 105 and 111 where Mbembe examines the banality of power. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., 109. 73. Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetic and Anaesthetic: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” in October: The Second Decade, 1986–1996, ed. Rosalind E. Krauss et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 5. 74. Esseye Gebremedhin interview. 75. Geta Mekonnen interview. 76. Herwig Kempf, interview with the author, February 2013, Addis Ababa. Herwign Kempf was director of the Goethe Institute in Addis Ababa from 1978 to 1985. 77. Ibid. 78. Genet Zewdie, Resistance, Freedom and Empowerment: The Ethiopian Women’s Struggle (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 2014), 80. 79. “Setochna balabatawi hebreteseb” (Women in the feudal system), Goh 1, no. 1 (October 1975): 22. 80. Kebedech Tekleab, interview with the author, December 2002, Washington, DC. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Debebe Seifu, Joseph Stalin’s Marxism and the Problems of Language (Addis Ababa: Kuraz Printing Press, 1979), 4. 84. Semeneh Ayalew and Binyam Mendisu, “What Is in a Term? A Historical and Linguistic Examination of the Revolutionary Terminology: Yewdam, ‘Let It

Be Demolished, Down With,’ 1974–1977,” in “Engaging the Image of Art, Culture and Philosophy: Particular Perspective on Ethiopian Modernity and Modernism,” ed. Elizabeth Giorgis, special issue, Northeast African Studies Journal 13, no. 1 (2013): 55. 85. Ibid., 63. 86. Ibid., 62. 87. Ibid., 63. 88. Ibid., 64. 89. Ibid., 66. 90. Bisrat Shebabaw and Geta Mekonnen, interview with the author, February 2009, Addis Ababa. Chapter 5: Contemporary Ethiopian Art 1. Geta Mekonnen, Dimension (Addis Ababa: Central Printing Press, 1995), 4. 2. Ibid. 3. When the EPRDF first rose to power, it introduced the political and economic structure of abyotawi (revolutionary democracy). The structure allowed liberal reforms such as multiparty elections, but the government was the only entity that stimulated the central economic structure. 4. The idea of the developmental state came much later, after the EPRDF took power. The developmental state was successfully implemented in countries such as Japan and South Korea after World War II and is primarily associated with governments playing the leading role in promoting industrialization. An idea that is said to have been solely promoted by former prime minister Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian developmental state has been much debated by opponents of the EPRDF. However, a clear and coherent policy of the developmental state never materialized, and the country has changed its official policy since the death of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi to yet again promote the “revolutionary developmental state.” 5. Ethiopia adopted ethnic federalism and reorganized regions along ethnic lines when the EPRDF took power in 1991, supposedly to give ethnoregional rights and a federal and democratic structure to previously underrepresented groups. 6. International Crisis Group, “Ethiopia: Ethnic Federalism and Its Discontents,” Africa Report no. 153 (September 4, 2009). 7. Addis Neger (New Thing) was established in 2007 by a group of young journalists. A provocative and critical newspaper, it was shut down by the state in 2009, and fearing criminal charges, six of its founding editors fled the country that year. 8. Lematawi sene tebeb means “arts and culture for development.” Though there are no specific and formal guidelines, the state supports arts and culture interventions that directly amplify the political goals of development. Critiquing development projects through the arts is discouraged, and in spaces such as Addis Ababa University, critiquing the state’s development projects is not only discouraged but often blocked.

321

Notes to Pages 245–251

Notes to Pages 252–277 322

9. Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism,” 191. 10. Mekonnen, Dimension, 10. 11. Ibid. 12. Dereje Birhanu, “The Art of Bekele Mekonnen,” Time Out 1, no. 3 (January 2000): 10. 13. Rebecca Nagy and Achamyeleh Debela, “Yohannes Gedamu,” in Continuity and Change: Three Generations of Ethiopian Artists, ed. Rebecca Nagy (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 70. 14. Mekonnen interview. 15. Ibid. 16. Bahir Dar is the capital of the Amhara region. A collaborative effort by a group of artists, the monument is a memorial honoring those who gave their lives in fighting the Derg. 17. Bekele Mekonnen, interview with the author, February 2015, Addis Ababa. 18. Ibid. 19. The exhibition Addis Ababa: The Enigma of the “New” and the “Modern” was held at the Modern Art Museum’s Gebre Kristos Desta Center in October 2013 and ran through January 2014. Curated by Elizabeth Giorgis, the exhibition featured four artists: Berhanu Ashagrie, Michael Tsegaye, Mihret Kebede, and Mulugeta Gebrekidan. The artists focused on notions of development and its impact on daily lives. Provocative works in photography, installation, and video were presented. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalog of the same name. The event also initiated a year-long lecture series that was organized by the Goethe Institute and the Modern Art Museum, bringing together architects, sociologists, urban planners, and artists who centered their work on development. The series prompted local policy makers, who were also part of the lecture series, to consider amendments and changes to some of the city’s development projects. 20. Michael Tsegaye, interview with the author, July 2013, Addis Ababa. 21. Ibid. 22. Gebre Kristos Desta, “Menged Seteugn Sefi,” 68–69. 23. Michael Tsegaye, “Chasms of the Soul,” https://www.michaeltsegaye.com/ album/chasms-of-the-soul.html?p=1. 24. Berhanu Ashagrie, interview with the author, February 2015, Addis Ababa. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Mulugeta Gebrekidan is a painter and video artist. He was a member of Netsa Art Village and participated in Netsa’s Wax and Gold project by posing as a martyr and hero at one of Addis Ababa’s busy roundabouts, where a Samsung advertisement stands. 29. Robel Temesgen is a painter and video artist who teaches at the Alle School of Fine Art and Design. One of the most provocative young artists living today, Robel widely exhibits his work on both local and international platforms.

30. Eyob Kitaba, interview with the author, February 2015, Addis Ababa. 31. Habesha Studio is one of the earliest studios set up by a group of artists around the Ginfle area in Addis Ababa. These artists are mostly painters, and they sell their works predominantly to foreigners visiting or working in the country. 32. Kristin Hjellegjerde, exhibition catalog, Background 2. The exhibition was held at Kristin Hjellegjerde’s gallery in London from March 26 to May 2, 2015. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ethiopian Ministry of Education. “Ethiopia’s Education System Presented for the International Literacy Day,” September 2011, https://www.brookings.edu/wp -content/uploads/2012/04/Ethiopia_Fuad_Ibrahim.pdf. 36. Mihret Kebede, interview with the author, May 2015, Addis Ababa. 37. Susan Gubar, “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 2 (Winter 1981): 248. 38. Kebede interview. 39. Helen Zeru, interview with the author, April 2015, Addis Ababa. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. Conclusion 1. Alessandro Triulzi, “Adwa: From Monument to Document,” Modern Italy 8, no. 1 (2003): 96. 2. Ibid., 97. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Hiruy Wolde-Selassie, Ethiopian History (Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press, 2008). 6. The Alle School of Fine Art and Design collaborated with the Wits School of Art of Johannesburg, and the Boda Lounge video art project worked with multiple institutions across the continent. Both endeavors looked at issues of urbanism. 7. Dagmawi Woubshet, Calendar of Loss (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015). 8. Ibid., 2.

323 Notes to Pages 278–300

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Index

Abate, Agazit, xix Abebe, Bekele, 211, 221 Abebe, Dawit, 278–82 Abraha, Gedamu: on the hyphenated Ethiopian, 84–87, 90, 110 abstract art, 126–27, 169, 209 Addis Foto Fest, 268 Addis Reporter, 81, 84–91, 99, 115, 119–20, 153, 177 Adefres, 81, 108–10, 114–16, 119, 127–29, 177. See also Worku, Dagnachew Admassu, Yohannes, 82–83, 112–15, 121–22 Admassu, Yonas, xvii, 21, 85, 89, 97, 112, 115 Adorno, Theodor, 223 African modernism, 3, 128, 140, 171 Aklilu, Amsalu, 97 Aleka Hiruy, 69–70 Alfred, Genet, 239 Alemayehu, Eyob, xviii All Ethiopian Socialist Movement (MEISON), 203, 237, 239 Alvarez, Francisco, 32 Amenti, Deressa, 9, 51 Amharic dime novel, 90. See also Deressa, Solomon Amin, Samir, 4 Anderson, Perry, 16 Arada, 38–42, 46 Arada Giorgis, 69–70 Araeen, Rasheed, 168 Araya, Hailu, 214 Arendt, Hannah, 196, 213–14 Asad, Talal, 20 Ashagrie, Berhanu, xviii, 267, 273–76; and Ere-Bekentu, 273–74 Ashwood Garvey, Amy, 93

Assefa, Getahun, 225–26 Awel, Muzie, 254, 257 Axum, 5, 18, 189, 197, 293 Axumite civilization, xiv, 166 Ayalew, Semeneh, xviii, 245 Ayele, Melaku, 225–26 Azeze, Fekade, 214 Bahia, Hansen, 172, 178 Basha Asheber be America, 105–7. See also Lemma, Mengistu Battle of Adwa, 5–6, 16, 25, 27–28, 37; historical debate, 295–99; work by Belachew Yimer, 43–46, 62, 233, 266, 293. See also Menelik II Bekele, Bisrat, 211 Bekele, Shiferaw, 57 Bekele, Teshome, 236 Bekuretsion, Belachew, 68 Belachew, Gebre Kristos Solomon, 41, 45 Belay, Kidane, 211, 254, 257 Belayneh, Fikirte, 239 Belayneh, Tadesse, 24, 211, 213, 221, 226 Benjamin, Walter, 235 Berhanena Selam, 22, 26, 37–38, 62, 63, 70, 74, 96, 294, 299; on debates about seletane, 51–61; on notions of the modern, 40–49, 75 Beshah, Negadras, 56 Betre Yohannes, Semeneh, 217 Betul, Taitu, 43 Bezabih, Behailu, xviii, 186, 233, 254–57 Biasio, Elizabeth, 30 Birru, Meaza, xix Biseat, Kifle, 143–44, 153, 169, 172 Bisrat, Yigezu, 67

Index 336 Bizuneh, Alemayehu, 221 Boghossian, Skunder, xix, 17, 21, 23, 64, 67, 77–78, 82, 84, 116, 120–21, 128, 182; and artistic subjectivity, 136–38; biographical information, 138–40; the Ethiopia years, 151–61; the Paris years, 140–51; and students, 169–71; studio space, 1–13; the US years, 161–68; and Zerihun Yetimgeta, 171–74. See also Yetimgeta, Zerihun Bonsa, Shimelis, xviii, 26, 298 Boyadjian, Bedros, 71 Brancaleon, Nicolo, 32, 35. See also Chojnacki, Stanislas Brecht, Bertholt, 223 Buck-Morss, Susan, xviii, 141, 235 Budge, Willis, 32 Bulti, Girma, xix Byzantine art, 31, 34, 151 Campbell, Ian, 31, 33 capitalist modernity, 10, 52, 104, 122, 133 Césaire, Aimé, 143–44, 169 Chatterjee, Partha, 66–67 Cherkose, Abebech, 176 Chojnacki, Stanislas, 29, 30–35 church art, 18, 26, 27, 43, 63, 70, 74, 76–77, 127, 132, 149, 151–52, 154–55, 158, 164, 287, 294; influence of, 30–35; overview of, 28–29 Clifford, Michelle, 34–35 colonial modernity, 10, 11, 75 Commission to Organize the Party of the Working People of Ethiopia (COPWE), 210, 216, 222, 224–25 contemporary art, 23, 251–53, 282, 292 Dadi, Iftikhar, xvii Damte, Tigist, 239 Dawit, Araya, 68 Debela, Achamyeleh, 126 debtera, 137, 149; magical scrolls, 155–56, 158–59 decolonization, 3, 4, 14–15, 101 Demissie, Felege Selam, 229 Deres, Zeray, 229, 231–33 Deressa, Solomon, xix, 2, 21, 82, 110, 130, 143, 150, 152–54, 156, 159, 162, 172–73, 294; on the Amharic dime novel and “Non Sequitur,” 90–91; on Gebre Kristos Desta, 132–33, 136–41; on the hyphenated Ethiopian, 84–87. See also Desta, Gebre Kristos

Derg, 12, 184, 247, 249, 256, 257, 265, 280, 283, 293; artists’ memories, 209–10; the beginning years, 204; and culture, music, and literature, 200, 216–21; downfall of, 225; mural at Yegegnoch Amba, 211–13; and nationalist imagination, 186–87; and student artists, 227, 233–34; and women artists, 237–44; works of art, 227–32, 233, 236; and Yekinetebat seminar, 214–16 Desta, Gebre Kristos, v, 17, 23, 67, 77–78, 82–83, 116, 119, 139, 152, 161, 178, 192, 209, 271–72, 294; and Desta Hagos, 178–81; and students, 153, 161, 168–73, 178, 257; works of art, 120–34, 194–96. See also Hagos, Desta; Yetimgeta, Zerihun developmental state, 13, 20, 250; developmental arts and culture, 251, 260–61; development and subjectivity, 269, 298; rapid development, 259–60, 267 Dimension Group, 247, 254–55, 257–58, 262 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 143–44, 169 Domenico, Zerihun, 67 Donham, Donald, 12 Du Bois, W. E. B, xiv, 6, 94, 141 Eagleton, Terry, 223 Elias, Gebreegzabher, 60–61 El Salahi, Ibrahim, 150 Endih New, 96–97 Enedeg, Kendeneh, xviii Engida, Agegenhu, 17, 43, 47, 57, 63; works of art, 64, 66, 67–68 Enwezor, Okwui, 13–14, 140–41 Ere-Bekentu, 273–74 Eritrean Peoples’ Revolutionary Front (EPLF), 239 Eshete, Aleme, 212, 224 Eshete, Andreas, xvii, 11–12, 25, 67, 91, 94, 100, 203–7 Eshete, Workeneh, 9, 51–52 Este teteyeku, 81, 112–15, 116, 121. See also Admassu, Yohannes Ethiopian exceptionalism, xiii, xiv, xv, 6, 17–18, 63, 67, 106; exceptionalist ideals, 19–20; exceptionalist imaginary, 49, 52 Ethiopian modernism, 3–4, 7–8, 16, 23, 28, 36, 40, 47, 67, 74, 77, 78–81, 108, 120, 122, 137, 161, 168–69, 209, 246, 294; tradition and modernism, 17–20

Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), 13, 20, 224, 248–50, 253, 256, 295, 299 Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Party (EPRP), 97, 203–4, 237–39 Ethiopian socialism, 23, 205; scientific socialism, 215–16, 224, 245, 248 Ethiopian Student Movement, 11–12, 75, 100, 110, 113, 119, 178, 203, 205, 207, 236–37 Ethiopian studies, 35–36 Ethiopian Women’s Coordinating Committee (EWCC), 237–38 European modernism, 3, 15–16, 29, 45, 75, 77, 128–29, 140, 173 famine, 185, 188, 200; works about the famine, 190–97 Fanon, Frantz, 85, 87, 128, 196 Felege Selam, Alle, 67, 76, 211 feminine subjectivity, 178–80; on the female body, 244; and sexualized subjectivity, 285–87 Fine Art School, 26, 80, 82, 120, 126, 151, 153, 159, 161, 168, 170, 173, 178–79, 183, 185, 204, 209, 215, 232, 236, 239, 242, 245, 247, 252; Alle School of Fine Art and Design, 186, 253, 257, 258, 262, 269, 274, 276, 283; formation, 73–78; School of Fine Art and Design, 224–27 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., xiv Gebreegzabher, Sebhat, 82–84, 172, 180 Gebrekidan, Fikru, xiv, 91 Gebrekidan, Mulugeta, 259–60, 277 Gebremaryam, Behailu, 28, 298 Gebremedhin, Esseye, xviii, 198, 200, 205, 209–10, 213–14, 235 Gebremedhin, Tsegaye, v, xix, 6, 21, 83, 97–99, 150, 152, 182, 204 Gebremichael, Netsanet, xviii Gebreselassie, Gossa, 164 Gebreyohannes, Egwale, 74 Gedamu, Yohannes, 161, 170, 257 Gedle, Shewareged, 176 Ge’ez, 29–30, 294 Geressu, Dawit, 258 German Expressionism, 123–24, 126, 209 Gessese, Tesfaye, 21, 82, 84, 124, 214 Getaneh, Genet, xviii Gezahegn, Tamerat, 258 Ghiorgis, Fasil, 55

Girma, Bealu, 81–82, 84, 111, 114, 122, 126, 132, 173, 177, 215, 219–20, 227. See also KeAdmas bashager Gizaw, Tadesse, 67, 221 Goh, 238–39 Goshu, Worku, 24 Gramsci, Antonio, 55 Gran, Ahmed, 152 Greenberg, Clement, 172 Groys, Boris, 223 Gubar, Susan, 287 Habtewold, Aklilu, 95 Habtewold, Elizabeth, xviii, 216–18, 239, 283 Habtewold, Tasso, 28, 298 hager fikir, 54–55 Hagos, Desta, xviii, 121, 124, 170, 172, 178–80, 183 Haile, Getachew, 97 Haile Selassie I, 16, 46, 49, 63, 67–68, 71, 76, 92–93, 96, 100–101, 176, 188, 222 Haile Selassie, Endale, 172 Haile Selassie I University, 74, 91, 93, 95, 97, 120; Creative Arts Center, 82, 152; debates at, 86–88, 236; formation of the Fine Art School, 74; students, 97, 100–110; and women, 178, 236 Hansberry, William Leo, 93 Haregot, Seyoum, 95 Hassan, Salah, xvii, 3, 13, 140–41, 161 Henze, Paul and Martha, 31–32 Hiruy, Emaelaf, 17, 62, 68–69, 73 Huyssen, Andreas, 14 hyphenated Ethiopian, 84–87, 89–90, 110, 130. See also Deressa, Solomon; Abraha, Gedamu Ilg, Alfred, 27, 71 imperial ideology, 51, 62–63, 74, 77–78 Institute of Ethiopian Studies, xiii, 6, 7, 21, 30, 36 Islamic art, 151–52 Iton, Richard, 5 Jager, Oto, 30 James, C. L. R, 92 Kassa, Mulugeta, 258 Kassaye, Abebe, 225 KeAdmas bashager, 81, 111, 114, 116, 119, 129, 177. See also Girma, Bealu Kebede, Assegedech, 176 337 index

Index 338 Kebede, Messay, 10–11, 74–75 Kebede, Mihret, xviii, 277–78, 283, 286, 288, 290 Kebra Nagast, 41, 95, 101, 201 Kedus Yosef Cemetery, 271, 290 Kempf, Herwig, 236 Kenyatta, Jomo, 93 Kibru, Tesfahun, 258 Kifle, Kidanewold, 40 Kindred, Wendy, 86 kinet, 217, 227 Kitaba, Eyob, xviii, 277–78 Kosrof, Wossene, 128, 159, 170 Lam, Wilfredo, 136, 141, 155–56, 167 Lattier, Christian, 142 Lemma, Mengistu, 82–83, 105, 107, 178, 214–15, 294. See also Basha Asheber be America Lemma, Tesfaye, 214 Leroy, Jules, 18, 36 Levine, Donald, xiv Lubinski, K., 41 Lukacs, Georg, 223 magical realism, 156 Makki, Fouad, 11 Malcolm X, 93 Mamecha, Tadesse, 221, 226 Mamo, Worku, 24 Mandela, Nelson, 93 Marley, Bob, 166 Marx, Karl, xiii, xiv, 223 Marxism-Leninism: as an ideology, xiv, 12, 15, 97, 110, 113, 120, 173, 228, 237, 298 Marxist aesthetic, 223–24 Mazrui, Ali, 94 Mbembe, Achille, 234 McEwan, Dorothea, 30 McKinnon, Fiona, xix Medhin, Tewolde Berhan, 56 Mehretu, Julie, 167 Mekonnen, Bekele, xviii, 186, 221, 226, 236; on art after the Derg, 254–57; on works of art, 261–67 Mekonnen, Geta, xviii, 186, 209, 225, 227–28, 232, 247–48; on contemporary art, 254–57 Mekonnen, Walelign, 101 Mekuria, Abate, xix, 21, 82–83, 124, 172 Mendisu, Benyam, 245 Menelik II, 5, 27 37, 41, 46, 71, 233, 265–66, 273, 295–97

Mengiste, Meaza, 220 Mengistu, Dinaw, 220 Mercier, Jacques, 36, 158 Mesfin, Tadesse, xviii, 24, 170–71, 204, 209, 224, 226, 254, 257 Mezlekia, Nega, 220 Mignolo, Walter, 4 modernization, 8–11, 13, 52–53, 62, 66–67, 75, 96 Mother Ethiopia, 190, 192–94, 198, 200, 210–12 Mudimbe, Valentin, 10, 75, 138 Mulat, Ayalneh, 214 Muluneh, Aida, 268 mythical totemism, 155 nation, 18, 41–42, 46, 49–51, 53, 62–63, 66, 73, 77, 96, 114, 184, 200, 234 nationalism, 28, 44, 46, 50, 73, 101, 118, 138, 200–201, 203, 204, 248, 250, 265, 293, 298–99; nationalist ideology, 233; nationalist imagination, 185–86 Netsa Art Village, 258–59, 261, 286 New Art Space Monastery (NAS), 257–58 Neway, Germame, 91 Neway, Mengistu, 91, 143 Nkrumah, Kwame, 93 “Non Sequitur,” 90. See also Abraha, Gedamu; Deressa, Solomon Norden, Hermann, 41 Okeke-Agulu, Chika, 13–14, 140, 182 Organization of African Unity, 15, 92–93, 99, 152 Orientalism, xiv, 19, 22, 29, 30, 34 Oromay, 219–20, 227. See also Girma, Bealu Orthodox Church, 6, 9–10, 18–21, 26, 28, 31, 63, 75, 77, 109, 114, 137, 139, 149, 154, 155, 297 pan-Africanist, 23, 81, 93–94, 97–100, 108, 188 Pankhurst, Richard, 25, 28, 35, 42, 57 photography, 27, 71, 268, 263 Picasso, Pablo, 128 political modernity, 7, 9, 11, 17 Powell, Richard, 144 Presence Africaine, 144 Raguel, 34 Rahmeto, Desalegn, 119, 189 Redda, Berhane Meskel, 97 Red Terror, 134, 178, 184, 208, 210, 240

revolution, 178, 181, 184, 186, 190, 201, 203–4, 210, 213, 220 Revolutionary Ethiopian Women’s Association (REWA), 239 Ricci, Lanfranco, 29 Rosen, Friederich, 28 Sahle Mariam, Leoul, 229 Sandwith, George, 42 Scott, David, 7, 20 Scott, William, 188 Seifu, Debebe, 188–89, 197, 214–16, 245 Seiler, Herbert, 76 seletane, 9,-40–41, 47–55, 58, 61–62 Seletene, Almaz, 239 Seyum, Konjit, 254 Shack, William, 93 Sharew, Samuel, 229, 232 Shebabaw, Bisrat, xviii, 239, 242, 246, 283, 285 Sheriff, Abdelrahman, xviii, 86, 153, 208–9 Shiferaw, Demissie, 211 socialism. See Ethiopian socialism socialist realism, 222, 225 sovereignty, 9, 51–52, 54, 61, 91, 96, 297 Spencer, Diana, 33 Spivak, Gayatri, 55 Stalin, Joseph, 245 Suriano, Francesco, 32 Tadele, Tsigereda, xviii Tadesse, Ethiopia, xix Tamrat, Taddesse, 32–33 Taye, Daniel, 229 Tebebu, Teshale, 94 Teferra, Fitsum, xix Tefferi Mekonnen, 46–47, 60, 70 Tekleab, Kebedech, xix, 227, 239–40, 242 Tekle Mariam, Tekle Hawaryat, 58 Tembele, Yemane Berhan, 68 Temesgen, Robel, xviii, 277–78 Terfa, Tebebe, 24, 236 Tessema, Mezgebu, 24, 225–26, 254–55, 257 Tessema, Yohannes, 28 Tiglachen, 221–22 Tigray Peoples’ Revolutionary Front (TPLF), 239, 242 Tiruneh, Eshetu, 24, 193, 226, 254, 257 Tobiya Poetic Jazz, 288 tradition, 17, 19–20, 126, 128–29, 153–54. See also Ethiopian modernism

Triulzi, Alessandro, 229, 232, 295–96 Tsegaye, Michael, 267–72, 290 Tsige Markos, Tewodros, 172 Tuafe, Daniel, 211 Tutuola, Amos, 146–47 Washera, 34 Williams, Eric, 93 Williams, Raymond, 15 Witakwoska, Eva Balicka, 30 Wodajo, Kifle, 99–100 Wolde, Seyum, 63, 69–70, 186, 215–16, 223, 227 Wolde Giorgis, Abebe, 47, 67–68 Wolde Giorgis, Getinet, v Wolde Hanna, Feleke, 48 Wolde Hawaryat, Takkala, 63 Wolde Medhin, Taye, 128 Wolde Qirqos, Merse-Hazen, 60–61 Wolde Selassie, Hiruy, 58, 75 Wondimu, Surafel, xviii Worku, Dagnachew, 81–82, 97, 108, 114, 116, 122, 126, 132. See also Adefres Worku, Daniel, xix Woube Bereha, 83–84, 172 Woubshet, Dagmawi, xvii, 263, 300 Yetagesu, Wolde Medhin, 68 Yetimgeta, Zerihun, xviii, 120, 153, 161, 168–71, 174, 181, 183, 235–36. See also Boghossian, Skunder; Desta, Gebre Kristos Yifru, Ketema, 95 Yimam, Baye, 37 Yimer, Belachew, 17, 26, 28, 40–46, 50, 58, 63–64, 68, 71, 298 Yohannes, Messay, xviii Yoseph, Getachew, 225–26 Yoseph, Menbere, 239 zämänay or zäbänay, 37–41 Zelleke, Elleni “Centime,” 298 Zelleke, Senafikish, 239 Zemenawinet, 40, 62 Zeru, Haregwa, 229, 239 Zeru, Helen, xviii, 277–78, 283, 288–90 Zetkin, Clara, 237 Zewde, Bahru, 9–11, 63, 74–75 Zewdie, Genet, 237 Zewditu, 46, 60

339 index

Index 342