Donald N. Levine (1974), author of Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multi-ethnic Society, who has popularized Carlo Conti-Rossin’s description of Ethiopia as ‘un museo di popoli’ – ‘a museum of peoples’ (pp. 19-20) has credited the evolution of multi-ethnic Ethiopia as an ‘Amhara thesis’, ‘Oromo anti-thesis’ and the ‘Ethiopian synthesis’. Whatever the merits of his historical analysis and the anthropological fascination thereof for the making of Ethiopia, at a point in time his work did go to the press, the country moved to a crisis of major proportion whose resultant effect was a revolutionary reconstitution of both state and society that relegated the country’s ancien regime to the museum of history. This put to a severe test both his thesis and the celebrated historical evolution of the country as a whole. And now, in less than two decades, the Tigrayan anti-thesis, the negation of his ‘Ethiopian synthesis’ – to use Marxist dialectics for want of a better term – is in its full swing – a far reaching agenda of the remaking of Ethiopia, in a manner that redirects, if not fully reverse the historical evolution of modern Ethiopia.
ፍትህ ለሁሉም / Justice for All