THE IDEOLOGICAL PLANE IN SELECTED ETHIOPIAN

DIASPORIC PROSE NARRATIVES IN ENGLISH: A

COMPARATIVE STUDY OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

HAFTU KAHSAY

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN

LITERATURE IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN FOREIGN LITERATURE

ADDIS ABABA UNIVERSITY

ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA

JUNE, 2012
 THE IDEOLOGICAL PLANE IN SELECTED ETHIOPIAN
DIASPORIC PROSE NARRATIVES IN ENGLISH: A
COMPARATIVE STUDY OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

HAFTU KAHSAY

ADVISOR: MELAKNEH MENGISTU (PhD)

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN

LITERATURE IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN FOREIGN LITERATURE

ADDIS ABABA UNIVERSITY

ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA

JUNE, 2012
 ADDIS ABABA UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

This is to certify that the thesis prepared by Haftu Kahsay entitled: The Ideological Plane in
Selected Ethiopian Diasporic Prose Narratives in English: A Comparative Study of Political
Philosophy and Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of
Arts in Foreign Literature complies with the regulations of the university and meets the accepted
standards with respect to originality and quality.

Signed by the examining committee

Examiner___________________________ Signature______________ Date_____________

Examiner___________________________ Signature______________ Date_____________

Advisor __________________________ Signature______________ Date_____________

Chair of Department or Graduate Program Coordinator

 Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Melakneh Mengistu,
for all what he has done in making this paper fruitful. It is also my pleasure to thank Dr. Abiy
Daniel and Abraham for their generous co-operation in providing me some of the target texts. I
am also duty bound to thank Kenenisa for serving me with his interesting and relevant books. I
still want to extend my gratitude to my colleagues at Jimma University, particularly Ashenafi,
Yimam, Wondimagegn and Nigus for sharing with me their materials and ideas. The moral
support I was offered by Kassaye, Kidist, Zifan, Bereket and Atlas is also worth mentioning.
 Abstract
This study was conducted on the diasporic Ethiopian literature in English with a primary purpose
of filling the observed gap with regard to readers’ hasty judgments. Most of the first generation
Ethiopian diaspora are political victims and, thus, their literary works are full of political
ideologies. Because of this, they are easily judged as opposers of the domestic politics of their
country by the state authorities on the one hand, and taken for granted as trustworthy to their
people by their supporters on the other hand. It is due to this fact that a study on the ideological
plane of some selected texts from the diaspora became the prime interest of the researcher. As
ideological plane deals with the philosophy behind a given ideology, it greatly contributes in
minimizing hasty judgments by rationally bringing the reality to light.

The method employed in this study is textual analysis. It is a qualitative description and
interpretation of the main issues of the study as reflected in the selected texts. The results of the
four texts are also comparatively seen so as to help reveal the commonalities and differences.
With regard to the theoretical framework, the entire analysis of the study was conducted from the
angle of the three main theories of political philosophy, namely theory of the state of nature, the
divine right theory, and the social contract theory.

Thus, it is found that the major ideologies reflected in the selected texts are Feudo-capitalism,
Marxism-Leninism, Nationalism, anarchism, and liberalism. As the main focus of the study, the
ideological plane has shown the realities behind the stated ideologies. In principle, the leaders
with their forgrounded ideologies claimed/ are claiming that they were/ are busy to bring justice,
security, freedom and democracy. However, the reality is that there were/are injustice, insecurity,
inequality, lack of freedom and democracy, and state intervention instead. The plane has also
shown that the political philosophy of some of the authors is very shallow, while that of others is
relatively better.
 Table of Contents
Contents Pages

Definition of Key Terms ............................................................................................. iv

Chapter One: Introduction ........................................................................................... 1
1.1 Historical Background of the Study ....................................................................... 1
1.1.1 Evolution of Ideology. ..................................................................................... 1
1.1.2 A Brief Political History of Ethiopia ................................................................ 5
1.1.3 The Diasporic Ethiopian Literature in English as a Reaction to Demostic
Politics ........................................................................................................... 8
1.2 Statement of the Problem...................................................................................... 10
1.3 Research Questions .............................................................................................. 11
1.4 Objectives of the Study......................................................................................... 11
1.4.1. General Objective ......................................................................................... 11
1.4.2. Specific Objectives ....................................................................................... 11
1.5. Significance of the Study ...................................................................................... 12
1.6. Scope and Limitations of the Study ...................................................................... 12
1.6.1. Scope of the Study ....................................................................................... 12
1.6.2. Limitations .................................................................................................. 13
1.7. Methods and Procedures ....................................................................................... 14

Chapter Two: Literature Review ................................................................................. 15

2.1 Review of Concepts............................................................................................... 15
2.1.1 The Concept of Ideology ................................................................................. 15
2.1.2 The Concept Ideological Plan .......................................................................... 17
2.1.3 The Concept of Diaspora. ................................................................................. 17
2.2 Review of Related Works ...................................................................................... 18
2.2.1. A Review of a Related Work on Ideology ...................................................... 18
2.2.2. A Review of Related Works on Diaspora ....................................................... 19

i
Chapter Three: Theoretical Framework ....................................................................... 21
3.1 Theory of the State of Nature................................................................................ 22
3.2 The Divine Right Theory ...................................................................................... 25
3.3 The Social Contract Theory .................................................................................. 26

Chapter Four: Analysis and Interpretation of Ideological Plane in the Target Texts ..... 30
4.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 30
4.2 Analysis of Ideological Plane in Beneath the Lion’s Gaze.................................... 30
4.2.1 Summary of the Text ..................................................................................... 30
4. 2.2 The Inviolability of the Throne ..................................................................... 31
4.2.2.1 The Source of Political Power of the King .............................................. 32
4.2.3 The Reaction against the Power of the King...................................................... 34
4.2.4 Feudo-Capitalism Vs Marxism-Leninism ......................................................... 36
4.2.4.1 Land Tenure and Economy in the Feudal System ...................................... 36
4.2.4.2 Denial of Justice ....................................................................................... 39
4.2.4.3 Denial of Democracy ................................................................................ 41
4.2.5 Disillusionment of the People and the New Struggle ........................................ 43
4.2.5.1 Public Insecurity ........................................................................................ 43
4.2.6 Derg’s Fascist Nationalism. ............................................................................ 47
4.3 Analysis of Ideological Plane in Give Me a Dog’s Life Any Day: African
Absurdities II......................................................................................................... 49
4.3.1 Summary of the Text ...................................................................................... 49
4.3.2 Hama’s Anarchist Ideology ............................................................................ 51
4.3.3 Double Standard ............................................................................................. 56
4.3.3.1 Unfairness................................................................................................. 57
4.3.3.2 Brutality and Selfishness ........................................................................... 59
4.3.3.3 Hypocrisy ................................................................................................. 61
4.3.4 Black against Black ....................................................................................... 63
4.4 Analysis Ideological Plane in Held at a Distance. ................................................. 65
4.4.1 Summary of the Text ...................................................................................... 65
4.4.2 Rebecca’s Nationalist Ideology........................................................................ 66
4.4.2.1 Language ................................................................................................. 67

ii
 4.4.2.2 Religion ................................................................................................... 69
4.4.2.3 Balkanization Vs the Glorious Past .......................................................... .71
4.4.3 Rebecca’s Liberalist Ideology. ........................................................................ 73
4.5 Analysis of Ideological Plane in Notes from the Hyena’s Belly ............................. .75
4.5.1 Summary of the Text ...................................................................................... 75
4.5.2 Nega’s Marxist-Leninist Ideology. ................................................................... 77
4.5.2.1 Traditional and Religious Beliefs. .............................................................. 78
4.5.2.2 Morality and Hypocrisy ............................................................................. 81
4.5.2.3 Nega’s Reaction against Economic Exploitation ........................................ 83
4.5.3 Nega’s Liberalist Ideology............................................................................... 85
4.6 Comparative Analysis of Political Philosophy ....................................................... 87
4.6.1 Nature of Good and Bad Governance ............................................................... 87
4.6.2 Attributes of Good and Bad Governance .......................................................... 89
4.6.3 Effects of Good and Bad Governance .............................................................. 91
4.6.4 A Way Forward as Suggested by the Authors .................................................. 91
4.6.5 The Morality of the Authors ............................................................................. 92
Chapter Five: Conclusion and Recommendations ........................................................ 94
5.1 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 94
5.2 Recommendations…………………………………………………………………96
References………………………………………………………………………………97

iii
 Definition of Key Terms
Balkanization: the division of a nation into regions that are mutually hostile.

Diasopra: group of people who left their homeland and dispersed all over the world.

Double Standards: different standards used to treat people who are in similar situations. This is
used to refer the Western unjust and biased treatment of the Africans as
compared to their own folk and even things.

Fascist Nationalism: an extreme nationalism that does not give care to the security of citizens.

Hypocrisy: a false claim of having high principles and beliefs.

Ideology: refers to a thought which is composed of myth, religion, history, philosophy, politics
etc.
Ideological plane: refers to the level of reality of thoughts and practices behind a given
ideology, or it is plane on which a forgrondeed ideology and the philosophy
behind the ideology are revealed.

Liberalism: an ideology that adheres to individual freedom, privatization, and competition by

opposing government intervention.

Man: is used as a generic word to refer to all human beings.

Morality: refers to conduct that is in accord with socially accepted standards.

Plane: the level of reality of thoughts and practices

Political philosophy: a study that deals with the “investigation into the nature, cause, and effect
of good and bad government” (Miller, 2003: 13).

iv
 Chapter One: Introduction

1.1 Historical Background of the Study

This part of the introduction addresses the historical trends that do have a direct relevance to the
study at hand. Among others, only three areas are selected because of their change through time.
Hence, the evolution of ideology, political history of Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian diasporic
literature in English as a reaction to domestic politics are the integral parts of the historical
background of this study.

1.1.1 The Evolution of Ideology

Ideology is an elastic term which is most often used in various disciplines to refer to ideas which
govern fellow people to behave and act in line with them. Though the term has come to light
since the eighteenth century, the concept was there in the minds of our early ancestors. Because
of its diverse nature, it meant many things for many people across history. Not only this, the
conception has also passed through a number of evolutions and revolutions both in depth and
width. To have a clear insight of the historical development of ideology, it is indispensable to see
it from the angles of practicality and theoreticality. Ilitskaya (1977) substantiates the practical
nature of ideology as follows:

To insure his subsistence, man must provide himself with food, clothing,
shelter and so on. He must get all these things ready-made from nature.
Ever since man raised from the animal world, he has used more and more
products of nature that need to be processed. Man cannot eat meat raw; it
must be cooked first. Even primitive man, before he could wrap himself in
animal’s skin, first had to kill the animal, skin it and cure the skin (p: 330).
The above ideas indicate that ideology doesn’t mean only an accumulation of abstract ideas
aliened from practice rather their combination and more. Jonathan (1992) as cited in Quinn
(2006: 236) asserts that ideology “is composed of those beliefs, practices and institutions which
work to legitimate the social order.” However, there are people on the course of history who
influenced the great majority of their fellows by mystifying the concept of ideology as an
essence somewhere isolated from our real experience. Primarily, this sort of stand is highly

1
reflected in Plato’s work, The Republic, which talks about his ideal state. With regard to this,
Fisseha (2009) forwards the following ideas:

Plato in his theory known as platonic idealism claimed that the substantive
reality around us is only a reflection of a higher truth. The truth, Plato
argued, is an abstraction. He believes that ideas are more real than the real
things. He developed a vision of two worlds: a world of unchanging ideas
and a world of changing physical (p: 48).
As per Plato’s transcendental view, all physical objects, including practices and institutions, are
simply regarded as lower in the realm of metaphysics. This clearly shows the deficiencies of the
ideologies that our practices and institutions are guided by. After all, Plato has come up with two
worlds: one is the abstraction while the other is the physical. He claims that the abstraction is the
pure idea, while the physical is the real world; and adds that the former is discovered through
reasoning (objective), whereas the later is speculated through sense perception (subjective). This
assertion of the scholar which gives unreserved privilege to the abstraction over the physical was
later challenged by philosophers whose basement is on empiricism, phenomenology, materialism
and objectivism. From among empiricists, the famous John Locke contends, “…in this sequence
of events, one begins with a blank slate, a mind empty of ideas” (Childs and Fowler, 2006: 23).
As per Locke, the ideas we accumulate in our mind are accessed from our practical experiences
in the day to day activities we are engaged in. Stimulated by Plato’s assertion, that didn’t make
any sort of excuse on all types of sense perception, the later school of phenomenology reacted
with their stand on reductionism. Edmund Husserl, who is the first to the philosophical
movement of phenomenology, coined the term reductionism to refer to the portrayal of
phenomena as they exactly appear to consciousness not as an interpretation based on prior
information. This philosophy of Husserl was, in fact, influenced by Franz Brentano, who
regarded philosophy as “a description of phenomena not an explanation of them” (Ibid., p. 173).
On the basis of this, Childs and Fowler further strengthened the matter as:

However, in order to describe phenomena properly, a vital part of which is

how they appear to consciousness, it is necessary to suspend all those
things, such as tradition, science and common sense, which distort
perception. Husserl called this process ‘reduction’. Only by reducing the
role of habit in our perception can we see phenomena in their purity. It is
important to stress that Husserl is not saying that we will see things as they
really are, but only as they appear to consciousness (p: 173).
2
The above school of thought (phenomenology) primarily challenges the ontological stand of
Plato on reality. As opposed to the separate and pure existence of reality (i.e. pure Forms or
Ideas), these later scholars gave primacy to a ‘reduced appearance to consciousness’, which in
fact was/is highly criticized for its subjective nature. Entertaining all the criticisms forwarded
against them, they have contributed two grand ideals; they believe that there is no separate world
of ideas, and further claimed that ‘things as they really are’ cannot be seen even through
consciousness. In the late twenty century, Ayn Rand, an Objectivist philosopher, came up with
ideas which partly support and partly oppose the ideas of the phenomenologists. Peikoff (1991),
in his book about Rand’s philosophy, has put her ideas in his own ways as:

The idealists—figures such as Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Hegel—regard

reality as a spiritual dimension transcending and controlling the world of
nature, which later is regarded as deficient, ephemeral, imperfect—in any
event, as only partly real. Since “spiritual” in fact, has no meaning other
than “pertaining to consciousness,” the content of true reality in this view
is invariably some function or form of consciousness (e.g. Plato’s
abstractions, Augustine’s God, Hegel’s Ideas). This approach amounts to
the primacy of consciousness and thus, as Ayn Rand puts it, to the
advocacy of consciousness without existence. In regard to epistemology,
Ayn Rand describes the idealists as mystics, “mystics of spirit.” They are
mystics because they hold that knowledge (of true reality) derives not
from sense perception or from reasoning based on it, but from an
otherworldly source, such as revelations or the equivalent (p: 31).
Rand, in her philosophy of objectivism, criticizes idealists, phenomenologists, and materialists
all together. Her reaction against the idealists is that they advocate the dualism of consciousness
and existence. Phenomenologists also share this stand of the idealists by claiming that what
comes to consciousness is not exactly the same as the independent existence of the things being
perceived. Underlining the mystification of the idealists and subjectivity of the
phenomenologists, Rand asserts, “Concepts do not pertain to consciousness alone or to existence
alone; they are products of a specific kind of relationship between the two. Abstractions are
products of man’s faculty of cognition and would not exist without it. But a faculty of cognition
is concerned to grasp reality and must, therefore, adhere to reality” (Peikoff, 1991: 111). In fact,
except for the mystification of reality, Plato also believes that the separate world of ideas or
reality could be discovered only through reasoning. Though she herself revolves around his
ideals with a sort of modification, Rand still did not acknowledge this grand contribution of Plato
3
to rationality. Even worst, she blames him for rejecting reasoning, while he himself casts poets
for being irrational.

Beyond this, Rand criticizes materialists for being irrational; she is a prominent figure for
attacking both idealists and materialists at a time. “Ayn Rand describes materialists as ‘mystics
of muscle’—‘mystics’ because, like idealists, they reflect the faculty of reason. Man, they hold,
is essentially a body without a mind” (Ibid., p. 33). Based on Rand’s conception against the
materialists, Peikoff has further criticized them in the following way:

Despite their implicit mysticism, materialists typically declare that their

view point constitutes the only scientific or naturalistic approach to
philosophy. The belief in consciousness, they explain, implies
supernaturalism. This claim represents a capitulation to idealism. For
centuries the idealists maintained that the soul is a divine fragment or
mystic ingredient longing to escape the “prison of the flesh”; the idealists
invented the false alternative of consciousness versus science. The
materialists simply take over this false alternative, then promote the other
side of it. This amounts to rejecting arbitrarily the possibility of a
naturalistic view of consciousness (Ibid., p. 33).

This scientific approach of the materialists leads us to the very notion of ideology when it was
first coined by Destutt de Tracy to mean “the science of ideas.” Bikkenin (1980: 173) asserts,
“Ideology is the science of ideas. The term ‘ideology’ and this definition are associated with the
name Destutt de Tracy, the French enlightener, and a man of letters who was the first to state that
the world of social and political ideas constitutes a separate department of knowledge.” By a
“separate department of knowledge”, he means that ideology follows a logic of its own, and has
its own principles and rules, which are by far beyond the mere speculation of subjective
opinions. Hence, when one studies something about ideology, it must not be forgotten that the
political themes should be seen from the angles of political theories and the philosophical themes
from logical thoughts. Thus, the discipline which holds these two areas in an integrated manner
is political philosophy, the core area in this study.

According to Miller (2003: 13) political philosophy is an “investigation into the nature, cause,
and effect of good and bad government.” From this conception, one can easily understand the
reason for the inclusion of these very decisive components of political science and philosophy.
For instance, the ‘nature’ of a government cannot be studied without the integration of political
4
science and philosophy; ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ is purely about science, in this case political science;
and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is purely the concern of philosophy. Among the proponents of political
philosophy, Thomas Hobbes has stated that human beings in a state of nature would live in a
world where everyone is an enemy to every other ones. He asserts that it is due to this fact that
people, for their own sake, began to compromise some of their rights by handing them over to a
sovereign authority, a government—typically absolute monarchy. Other political philosophers
who came after Hobbes agreed with him that life in the state of nature is full of instability and,
therefore, the ‘social contract’ that they took as an alternative is really a rational option. But, all
of them do not agree on the authority’s being an absolute monarchy. With regard to this, Miller
adds:

Political philosophers aim to justify institutions and practices that structure

and define our collective life. In so doing, they address such questions as
Can state authority be justified? If so, what form of government is best?
How should society’s resources be distributed among its members? What
part should the state play in this distribution? What part should markets
play? What do we owe our fellow citizen? (Ibid., p. 703).
The above discourse deals with the justification of the conceptions and applications of political
ideologies within people living in a social contract. This, therefore, leads us to the Ethiopian
political trend, and the ideologies that the governments were guided by in ruling their people
over the years of their political realm.

1.1.2 A Brief Political History of Ethiopia

Ethiopia is an ancient state which has autonomously and interdependently experienced various
political institutionalizations in the land of Africa. This indicates that the country has been
engaged in a social contract of any kind, and has practiced some political ideologies since then.
Gill (2010: 1) asserts, “With the rise of the kingdom of Axum in the century before Christ,
Ethiopia became one of the powers of the ancient world. Axum converted to Christianity a few
years before Rome and a few centuries before English”. He also adds that Ethiopia is a country
with its own unique and ancient civilization, culture and history. As an ancient Christian state,
the role of theocracy in the political history of the country is very deep rooted. The official visit
of queen of Sheba to king Solomon and the birth of Menelik I from these two big figures resulted
in the construction of the legendary, or as some say, historical state ideology of the Solomonic

5
dynasty by many kings across the political history of the country. Though the strength, the
civilization, and Christianity of the Axum kingdom were impressing, its link with King Solomon
was not accepted by some section of the then people. Later on, because of many internal and
external factors, Axum came to an end with a dynastic shift to the Zagwe Dynasty (Walelign,
2008: 108). The Zagwe Dynasty is another strong Christian kingdom whose kings are still
celebrated as saints without solomonic orientation. Though the founder of Solomonic Dynasty as
a state apparatus is Yikuno Amlak, this ideology that the Zagwe’s rejected is a tracing back to
the legend constructed by the Axumites. The new dynasty terminated the relation with
Solomon’s kinsmen by constructing the second Jerusalem—Lalibella, in Ethiopia. Still,
theocracy is at its height in regulating both the earthly and heavenly. This continued in the
Gonderian period and in the Showan kingdom.

The reason why this historical antiquity is incorporated in this study is that the various political
frictions of today’s generations are mostly historically reconstructed from what has happened
since time immemorial. This is what is really happening both within Ethiopians in Ethiopia, and
Ethiopians and Ethiopian origins in the diaspora (Solomon, 2007: 232). As this study deals with
the Ethiopian diaspora, the political history of the last four regimes has a direct impact on the
Ethiopian immigrants. Unlike the mass movement of ancient ancestors of man, and the Jewish
dispersal all over the world, the Ethiopian diasporal experience is relatively recent. However, it
has become debatable to fix the exact time in which Ethiopians began foreign settlement. Stating
the settlement of some Ethiopians for various reasons in abroad, Endalkachew (2008: 1) states,
“Ethiopian immigrants started migrating to the west following the 1974 coup.” He also quotes
Hodes (1997) that a great mass of Ethiopians moved to the US years between 1983 and 1993.
Moreover, he indicated that more than 55,000 Ethiopian Jewish migrated during the Moses
operation of 1985 and Solomon operation of 1991.

However, Mekuria, (2002: 55) relates Ethiopian diaspora with slave trade which had been
practiced since ancient Abyssinian kingdoms till 1940s. Very explicitly, he mentions Yohans Iv
and Menelik II for taking advantage of exporting tens of thousands of war captives from the
conquered lands. Leaving this historical content matter to historiographers, it is now better to
concentrate onto the regimes that the selected texts talk about. Hence, the last three regimes,
namely the Monarchy, the Derg, and the EPRDF are, to a varied degree, the subject matters of
6
the texts under study. The coming of Emperor Haile Selasie with his several reforms, like
abolishing slavery, membership in the League of Nations, and the promulgation of the written
constitution of the 1931 created a bright hope in the entire population of the country (Walelign,
2008: 163). However, as time went on, his state ideology of Feudo-capitalism, which was
mainly founded on land, synthesized the seed for his downfall. Though there had been few
factories, the conditions with the labourers were not as such the agenda of the political tensions
of the time. Instead, the long lasted friction in the regime was the exploitative relationship
between the land lords and the peasants. Peasants were not able to reap the products of their
labour because of their tenanthood status. This situation aroused the anger of the young
intellectuals of the day who openly reverberated their motto of “Land to Tiller”. After the
aborted coup of 1960, the entire people were highly irritated as is stated by Ali (2006) in the
following way:

All events began in January and February 1974 by the heaving popular
involvement in different sections of the society: the soldiers’ mutiny to
obtain amelioration of their salary and their domestic staff, the taxi
drivers’ protest against the increase in price of the fuel in consequence of
world crisis of energy (p: 142).
Before the coming of the Derg to power, it is the people, especially the students that rocked the
basement of the monarchy. The failure of the king in taking the required measures appropriately
and timely led to the immediate causes for the collapse of the legendary Solomonic Dynasty.
Even at the last critical moment, he could not take actions. Concerning this, Walelign (2008:
169) says, “The salary oriented mutinies and the Wollo Famine fueled the revolutionary
movement. The monarchy was unable to respond to the people’s call quickly.” This paved the
way for the coming of the Derg to power.

The Derg was a military government that took state power in 1974, and ruled the country for
seventeen years with a Marxist-Leninist ideology. Unlike the Emperor’s regime, the Derg had
down stepped the role of religion in political affairs. After being irritated by the monarchy, the
Ethiopian people started half-heartedly expecting the promised changes. “Ethiopian’s hope with
the revolution was very high. People had great expectation and desire that freedom, equality,
justice, better life conditions and the values of democracy would be attained through the
revolution” (Ibid., p. 168). The land reform that Emperor Haile Selasie could not deal with was
7
the prime success of the Derg so far worth mentioning. However, the Derg was immediately
changed into wild against those who raised political questions. The “Red Terror”, then, took the
life so many Ethiopians, and forced others to confine themselves overseas as diasporas. All these
led the people to absurdity and pessimism. This, in turn, handed its power to its successor, the
EPRDF.

The EPRDF is the current government of Ethiopia which has taken power since 1991. While
fighting against Derg, they formerly had a Marxist-Leninist ideology, but following the world’s
inclination to capitalism after the cold-war, the leaders of the revolutionary democracy shaped
their capitalist ideology accordingly. Vestal (1999) states the new political ideology as:

Since coming to power in 1991, the EPRDF has been committed to market
economy for the country. Most of the legislation in force during the Derg
regime restricting a market economy and private business has been
abolished. Although a substantial number of the public enterprises are still
owned and run by the government, many of these eventually will be
privatized. State ownership was to be limited to certain strategic sectors
including civil aviation, the railway, energy, mining, the chemical
industry, telecommunications, insurance and banking. Changes in the
global economy, however, have forced the EPRDF leaders to modify their
plans and privatize parts of some of these sectors (p: 173).
However, this variant of capitalist ideology is not liberal in its nature for the government
intervenes in the economic affairs when the market fails working properly. Thus, the government
is criticized for ideological impurity now and then. Moreover, the ethnic based federal system is
perceived by many as a kind of divide and rule. With regard to the diaspora, many members of
the competing Liberation Fronts left the country once they realized that they cannot take power.
The 2005 election has also resulted in the migration of many political activists and journalists.
Generally speaking, most of the regimes of the modern Ethiopia played their roles in the
formation of the Ethiopian diaspora across world.

1.1.3 Ethiopian Diasporic Literature in English as a Reaction to Domestic

Politics

It is asserted that the Diasporic Ethiopian literature in English emerged following the mass
migration of Ethiopians all over the world following the 1974 coup. Though Ethiopians had no

8
experience of mass migration before this specified period, the political situation of the country
forced the educated citizens to leave their homeland. This is described by Solomon (2007) in the
following way:

Although Ethiopians continued to go to abroad for further education, they

always return to Ethiopia to take the excellent opportunities available to
them throughout the 196o s. Permanent migration, as such, was virtually
unknown among Ethiopians prior to the 1974 Revolution. The 1974
Revolution drastically changed this scenario. While Ethiopian- American
relations went down to zero level, and while the number of Americans and
other expatriates who were in Ethiopia were substantially reduced, the
number of Ethiopians living abroad, mainly in the United States, increased
by tens of thousands. By the late 1980s, in addition to the political exiles,
more than 25,000 Ethiopians had settled in various parts of the U.S. Most
of the Ethiopians were educated (p: 3).

Whatever reform they suggested, the voice of the educated Ethiopian diaspora was not heard by
the authorities at home. The only reaction that these Ethiopians made is expressing their woes
through their literary works. Mesfin (2012: 12) stated that the reactionary literary works of the
Ethiopian diaspora have social, economic and political content matters which are mainly related
to the condition of Ethiopia after 1974. Moreover, Endalkachew (2008: 1) has also stated that the
socio-political and historical context of the 1974 is the main literary context of most of the
diasporic texts. These assertions indicate that the diasporic Ethiopian literature in English has
emerged in the post 1974 revolution as a reaction to the domestic politics. Because of its
historical benchmark, this variant of Ethiopian literature is highly engaged in the political realm
of the country from different ideological views.

Hence, all the above realities have motivated the researcher to conduct this study on the
contemporary Diasporic prose narratives (written in the EPRDF Regime) to see the ideologies of
these current writers from the angle of theories of political philosophy in a comparative manner.

9
1.2 Statement of the Problem
So far, there are few research works conducted on ideology and Diaspora by students of foreign
literature in Addis Ababa University. For instance, Fisseha (2009) has done his best on the
ideology of Anglo-phone East African novels focusing on exploring the reflection of ideological
themes in general. Similarly, Endalkachew’s (2008) work on the predicament of the Ethiopian
Diaspora has explored the political and economic woes of their homeland and other
psychological traumas they faced in the host countries. Recently, Mesfin (2012) has also come
up with the thematic analysis of some selected prose fictional and non-fictional writings of the
Ethiopian diaspora. He also explored all sorts of the content matters of the texts in a very
extensive manner. In one way or another, he has addressed the existence of political ideologies in
the texts. However, he has not investigated the ideological plane reflected in the selected works
for it is beyond the scope of his work. In their own ways, these studies are good contributions
which clearly showed the gap to be filled or narrowed by this study.

In all the above studies, the ideological plane—level of reality of thoughts and practices, was not
investigated. Extracting the themes of the texts is a good thing, but the very important thing is
our reaction to the issues raised in the texts. We need to ask ourselves how far the ideologies
relate to our past, present, and future. For this to happen, one needs to look into the ideologies
very critically. So far, allegations of the diaspora to the domestic politics, and counter allegations
of the state authorities to the diaspora have become common experiences of Ethiopians
(Solomon, 2007: 225-226). Hence, texts written in this situation are, in common sense, judged by
opposers as propaganda tools, or praised by those on the side of the writers as blameless
products. But, by a simple one time reading, or by hearsay, one cannot say that this is wrong or
that is right. To say a certain political ideology is good or bad is a philosophical issue which
needs some logical justifications. But what is happening with regard to the diaspora literature is a
simple siding to either of the extreme poles.

Therefore, this study will look into the ideological plane reflected in the texts so as to bring to
light the political philosophy of the writers or of the time. This, the researcher believes, is not
attitude driven commentary, rather a reason based way of answering ideological questions.

10
1.3 Research Questions
As part of the researcher’s effort in scrutinizing the unreached zone (gap), this research hopefully
addresses the following basic research questions:
1. What are the major ideologies reflected in the selected Diasporic Ethiopian prose narratives
in English?
2. To what level of rationality do these ideologies manifest the reality of the events and thoughts
that they refer to when they are judged by theories of political philosophy?
3. What commonalities and differences do the authors have in their presentation of political
philosophy?

1.4 Objectives of the Study

1.4.1 General Objective

In a very broad sense, the objective of this study is to investigate the ideological plane as
reflected in the Diasporic Ethiopian prose narratives in English from the angle of theories of
political philosophy in a comparative manner.

1.4.2 Specific Objectives

To address the above general objective effectively, it is very essential to derive some relevant
action oriented specific objectives from it. Hence, the following specific objectives are designed
as the very destinations of the entire study:

1. to identify the main ideological themes reflected in the selected prose narratives
2. to state which political ideology/ideologies is/are prominent in which text(s)
3. to explain the level of rationality behind the reflected ideologies by using theories of political
philosophy
4. to compare the political philosophy of the authors as reflected in their specified literary works
5. to indicate whether the stated ideologies match with the existing ideology of the current
Ethiopian government, and to suggest if they could be options in case it fails functioning.

11
1.5 Significance of the Study
Primarily, this study is expected to be of a help to students of literature in their effort to analyze
the ideological themes of literary works in an interdisciplinary/ multidisciplinary manner.
Moreover, researchers who are interested to conduct their studies on ideology could also find it
helpful to access some concepts from it, and see further gaps for further researches. It is a reality
of this time that things are better seen from an interdisciplinary/ multidisciplinary mode of
analysis and interpretation. The contents in literary texts are most often composed of themes
about politics, philosophy, culture, love affairs, beliefs, etc. of the people that they refer to. Due
to this, works of literature are found to be very rich and conducive areas of research even for
other scholars from other disciplines. This work, therefore, contributes its best for researchers
from the fields of political science and philosophy if they are interested to conduct studies on the
political and philosophical realms of literature. Most importantly, this study could, to a
minimum, create a spirit of rationality both in the supporters’ and opposers’ views about the
migrant writers. It is to mean that readers of any kind (individuals, institutions, and people in
political power) could reasonably accept or reject the ideological themes of the authors under
study in particular and the Diaspora in general.
In a nutshell, students and researchers from the fields of literature, political science, and
philosophy; individuals and institutions that are directly or indirectly involved in politics, could
get a room of flexibility and rationality in this study; hence, smoothen their reaction to the
Diasporic literary works, still with their freedom to support or oppose the themes reasonably.

1.6 Scope and Limitations

1.6.1 Scope of the Study

Beyond its difficulty, it is unwise wastage of resources of time, money and energy to try to
conduct research without demarcating its scope. Thus, to make the work both effective and
efficient, the researcher has bounded it in many dimensions: time, genre, language, author and
theme. To make the study very near to our life, it is delimited (time wise) to the literary works
produced in the current Ethiopian government (EPRDF). However, it is too difficult to deal with
all the works produced in the specified time; so, only prose narratives are taken as the target
areas (genre wise) for the study. Still, it is both difficult and less significant to take all the prose
12
narratives, but only those which are written in English are chosen. For there are many Ethiopian
authors who wrote their narratives in the English language, only the Diaspora are taken for the
required purpose. In fact, it is also assumed that these authors, relatively, do have a better
atmosphere to freely say whatever they feel about the political arena of their country. The last,
but the most important parameter of demarcating the study area is the thematic aspect of the
prose narratives. The other dimensions used to limit the scope of this study are all physical or
outer parameters which do not directly relate to the subject matter of the study. The thematic
scope, which specifically deals with those ideologies that reflect political content matters, is the
very grand criteria for demarcating the boundary of this study.

On the basis of the designed scope for this study, prose narratives namely Beneath the Lion’s
Gaze (2010) by Maaza Mengiste, Give Me a Dog’s Life Any Day: African Absurdities II (2004)
by Hama Tuma, Held at a Distance:My Rediscovery of Ethiopia (2007) by Rebeca Haile, and
Notes from the Hyena’s Belly (2000) by Nega Mezlekia are selected as the very texts on which
the actual work is to be conducted comparatively.

1.6.2 Limitations
Because of their being relatively recent and their publication being abroad, the greatest challenge
of all is accessing the selected novels. The researcher has suffered a lot in searching the books
themselves before searching what is within them. Because of this, one of the formerly selected
books, Democratic Cannibalism, is replaced by Give Me a Dog’s Life Any Day, which is another
book on African Absurdities by the same author. Those which are available are also under the
monopoly of the Book World, which is selling them at a very exaggeratedly inflated price. Very
awfully, the price of a single book is capable of buying about ten books of its kind. However, it
is taken as good thing to get the books at any cost when we compare with that of others of which
trace of existence is hard to find.

13
1.7 Methods and Procedures
Since this study deals with some selected prose narratives, the method used here is textual
analysis. This qualitative approach is employed all over the entire work so as to address issues in
a detailed and descriptive manner. The actual work, in fact, was started with selecting the
appropriate texts for the study at hand. As it has been stated in the scope of this study, only texts
which have political themes are selected for they are rich in ideology. This, therefore, determined
what theories to use in analyzing the texts. To investigate the ideological plane reflected in the
selected works, and to bring to light the political philosophy of the writers and of the time, the
researcher used theories of political philosophy; and only ideologies which have political
relevance are mainly taken as subjects for analysis. Then, the results of the analysis of the texts
are comparatively seen so that the commonalities and differences can be clearly revealed.
According to Guillen (1993: 109-288), there are five basic issues through which literature can be
comparatively studied. These are: genology, morphology, thematology, historiology, and
internationality. From among these, the researcher has used thematology since the study deals
with themes of ideological plane, with political philosophy in focus, as reflected in the selected
texts. Specifically, Given’s (2008: 101) “Constant Comparative Analysis” was used in carrying
out the comparison. According to Given, the first thing a research has to do in carrying out a
comparative thematic analysis is selecting core issues or constants. Then, what each text says
about those core issues is comparatively studied. This is what the researcher of this study has
done in conducting a comparative analysis of political philosophy in the target texts. Generally,
this qualitative study has passed through some major procedures, namely selection, reading and
rereading, analysis, interpretation, and comparison.

14
 Chapter Two: Literature Review

This chapter deals with related sources and concepts that directly contribute to the entire work at
hand. According to Flick (2006: 263), the literature review of a research work is of two parts:
Conceptual literature, which deals with abstractions; and empirical literature, which deals with
related research works on the area of a given study. Based on this, this part of the study begins
with the concepts of ideology, ideological plane, and Diaspora; and then followed by a
condensed review of related works on the area.

2.1 Review of Concepts

This section briefly deals with the clarification of the main concepts of the study so that
ambiguities could be significantly reduced.

2.1.1 The Concept of Ideology

In way of showing the historical trend of ideology, some basic concepts were discussed in the
background of the study. However, ideology is such a very broad concept that various scholars
are endlessly immersed in it. These diversified views do have varied levels of depth and
specification. For instance, the very man who coined the term ideology (i.e.Tracy) has generally
put it as a “science of ideas”. This definition is very general and does not clearly show the
scientific procedures that one has to apply while dealing with ideas. In addition, if ideology is a
science, its distinction from the philosophical thought-system is not indicated. It is also strongly
stressed that scientific procedures are retrievable; thus, the result is a fact, not an opinion. Quite
to the opposite, Robertson (2003: 233) asserts, “Often an ideology means nothing more than
particular set of beliefs and values, with no specific view about which set is correct….” As per
Robertson, ideology has nothing to do with science for many reasons. Primarily, he claims that
an ideology is all about beliefs and values, and nothing beyond this. Secondly, he believes that
there is no clear cut factual presentation with the status of “correct”. All in all, his view about
ideology diverges from that of Tracy.
Similarly, Collin (2004:94) stated ideology as “a set of basic ideas about life and society, such as
religious or political opinions.” In this definition, the power of ideology in shaping individual’s
life and organizing society’s mental set up to a certain point of convergence is well stated. It also

15
goes to the extent of guiding the highly structured groups, like religious and political institutions.
These issues and others are extensively discussed by Therborn (1980: 2), who stated that, “… the
conception of ideology … includes both everyday notions and ‘experiences’ and elaborate
intellectual doctrines, both the ‘consciousness’ of social actors and institutionalized thought-
systems and discourses of a given society.” By far better than the preceding conceptions, this
conception has touched very crucial areas ranging from common sense to consciousness and
science, idea wise; and from individuals to institutions, subject wise. This scholar also shares
something in common with Tracy for the very inclusion of science, which is reflected through
the expression “institutionalized thought-systems”. Where there are structured systems and
methods, there is science for we can approve or disprove things based on the systems and
methods. However, there is a self-contradiction in Therborn’s concept; the term “intellectual
doctrines” does not correlate with the general concept of science. The aim of science is to
continuously improve the world by continuously improving the systems and methods; hence, it is
not as rigid as doctrines. To the contrary, doctrines are relatively rigid, and their general aim is to
bind people according to the rules set rather than paving the way for progressive changes over
time-they are not as change-oriented as science.

The notion “science of ideas” in describing ideology is also challenged by the later Marxist
thinkers. As stated by Tyson (2006: 139), “For Marxism, an ideology is a belief system, and all
belief systems are products of cultural conditioning. For example, capitalism, communism,
Marxism, patriotism, religion, ethical systems, humanism, astrology, and karate are all
ideologies.” Though all belief systems are considered as ideologies, they are quite different in
significance to human beings. “…though almost any experience or field of study we can think of
has an ideological component, not all ideologies are equally productive or desirable. Undesirable
ideologies promote repressive political agenda” (Ibid., P. 139). The very important thing here is
the question, what is the theoretical framework that enables one to say a certain ideology is
desirable while the other is undesired? This question is, in fact, the driving motive of the
researcher to conduct his work on this area.

Generally, the concept of ideology is very much diversified because of its wider scope. More or
less, Feuer (1975: 1) has tried to integrate the major components of the concept as, “…every
ideology is composed of three ingredients, the first, an invariant myth, the second, a compound
16
of philosophical doctrines which alternate cyclically in the history of ideology, the third, a
historically determined decision as to a chosen class of the time.” In this discourse, many
interrelated concepts, like myth, philosophy, history, and politics are explicitly incorporated.
Because of its potential in addressing the very core area of this particular study, ideological
plane, the researcher views ideology from this angle of conception. On the basis of Feuer’s view,
the concept of ideological plane is briefly treated below.

2.1.2 The Concept of Ideological Plane

Basically, ideology and ideological plane are not the same. Similar to Feuer’s conception, Collin
(2004: 119) states ideology as the “Set of basic ideas about life and society.” But the basic ideas
do not have equal importance and status. It is because of this that Tyson has said that all
ideologies are not equal: some are desirable while others are undesirable. To say a certain
ideology is desirable or undesirable to a certain context needs another framework beyond the
ideology at hand. Thus, it is ideological plane which further deals with the reality behind a given
ideology. With regard to this, Leach (2002: 107) described ideological plane as the “level of
reality of thoughts and practices.” In contrast to ideology, ideological plane gives room to a
critical and philosophical view of the world and all what is happening within it. As a matter of
fact, ideology is always forgrounded whereas the philosophy that created the ideology remains in
the background. It is, therefore, ideological plane that is concerned with the background
philosophy of every forgronded ideology. This is the very reason why ideological plane is
preferred to ideology in this study.

2.1.3 The Concept of Diaspora

As defined by Macmillan English Dictionary, Diaspora is a term which refers to “a large group
of people who come from a particular place and are now living in many different parts of the
world.” A movement of this sort is perceived differently by different people. Broadly, the main
perspectives are of two types: globalization and politico-economic victimization. As the result of
technological advancement, the world is becoming very near at hand just as Curtis (2005: 57)
asserted, “The processes of globalization have created a smaller world.” This, therefore, makes
things easier for people to move from one country to another, and have access to information
about their nations from afar (present) and from memory (past). The other perspective is that

17
people are forced to leave their homelands because of the existing repressive political and
economic systems posed upon them by people in power. Whatever the cause for their migration,
the immigrants are obviously occupied by mixed feelings of phobia and nostalgia; those who
became victims of unforgettable effect reflect their phobia while those who left good things
behind them reflect their nostalgia. As per religious history, the term Diaspora refers to the mass
migration and dispersal of the people of Israel all over the world, latter used to refer to other
people who experienced a similar fate. Concerning this, it is stated that:
The term Diaspora was initially used to describe the spread of the Jewish
people throughout the world; however, it is now used to people who have
been dispersed from their original homeland, have a strong ethnic identity
and wish to return to their homeland. Diasporas have been dispersed from
their homeland, but have not forgotten it, for whatever reason they have
maintained a strong national consciousness without a state of their own
(Ibid., p. 93).
The above discourse represents those Diaspora who have a nostalgic feeling after leaving their
homelands. In most cases, the situations in the host countries also determine the reaction and
attitude of the Diaspora towards their homeland; in countries where there is peace and prosperity,
the Diasporas feel phobia of their past. On the contrary, if the situations in the host countries are
worse, they wish they were home, nostalgia. However, those committed political migrants,
regardless of the condition in which they live, remain attached to the political arena of their
homeland, and manifest their attitudes from afar.

2.2 Review of Related Works

As it has been stated in the problem of the study, there are few works conducted on this area.
However, those which are available are found to be important for they could serve as
benchmarks for what is going to be focused on this study. Therefore, three works, one on
ideology and the other two on Diaspora are going to be discussed in brief here below.

2.2.1 Review of a Related Work on Ideology

Locally, Fisseha (2009) has conducted his study on the area of ideology for his doctoral
dissertation. This work (dissertation) is an ideological exploration in the East African Anglo-
phone novels (Petals of Blood, Kill Me Quick, Return to the Shadows, and Farah’s first Trilogy).
His major objective in conducting this study is to elucidate the nature of ideology by examining
18
the ideological structure of the texts under study with reference to the ideological representation
of socio-political realities. Based on his analysis, he has concluded that African history is a
history of domination. These parochial (local) and imperial (external) dominations have become
fertile grounds on which African literary works germinated. The novels, therefore, show how the
ideological state apparatus and the repressive state apparatus are structured to ensure the
dominance of the dominant on the dominated. However, the political philosophy behind the
domination and its counter reaction from the side of the repressed are not discussed for the very
reason that the main purpose of his study is exploring and explaining the existing ideology in the
target novels. In addition, the novels selected for this study (Fisseha’s) are of East African in
which no work of the Ethiopian writers (i.e. neither the Diasporic nor the non-diasporic) is
represented. Thus, these things are well considered in this current study.

2.2.2 Review of Related Works on Diaspora

There are two research works on the Ethiopian Diaspora literature conducted by one MA and the
other PhD students in the Department of Foreign Literature. The first is that of Endalkachew
(2008), which deals with the predicament of the Ethiopian migrants as reflected in The Texture of
Dreams and The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears. Briefly speaking, this study aims at
identifying and analyzing the various sorts of predicament and their effects as portrayed in the
texts under consideration. In the analysis part, he has seen things in two broad categories: woes
in the homeland and woes in the host land. With regard to the woes in the homeland, economic
and political woes are taken as the major issues reflected in the target novels. As per his analysis,
the Diaspora could not escape from other woes even in the host land, which they thought was a
room of relief and prosperity. Thus, the study asserts that the migrants are only transformed from
some types of woes to other types of woes, namely disillusionment, frustration, emptiness,
homesickness, racism and discrimination.

Though Endalkachew stated the various challenging situations of the Diaspora, he did not
explicitly say anything about the ideologies portrayed in the texts. Beyond this, no explicit
philosophical and political reaction of the Ethiopian Diaspora is stated in the analysis part of his
work. These things actually are not the focus of his study as one can understand from the
objectives he designed. This study, therefore, attempts to address these issues in a relatively
logical manner.
19
The second is a PhD thesis conducted by Mesfin (2012), which deals with a thematic study of
selected fictional and non-fictional writings. The study is limited to six texts, namely Give Me a
Dog’s Life Any Day: African Absurdities II (2004) by Hama Tuma, The Beautiful Things that
Heaven Bears (2007) by Dinaw Mengistu, The texture of Dreams (2007) by Fasil Yitbarek, Held
at a distance: My Rediscovery of Ethiopia. (2007) by Rebecca G. Haile, How to Read the Air
(2010) by Dinaw Mengistu, and Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (2010) by Maaza Mengistie. Under his
main objective of “discovering and critically assessing” the works, he has put three other
objectives of critically analyzing the content to establish some commonalities and divergences;
evaluating the extent to which the selected texts confirm to or diverge from the post-colonial
literary theory; and finding strategies for integrating the selected texts to the main stream
Ethiopian literature (Mesfin, 2012: 30-31).

In his entire analysis, he made a plot synopsis and thematic analysis for all of the selected texts.
From the various details of his study, he has come with five major themes as he put them in the
following way:

On the whole, five subject matters have emerged as the most dominant
themes that traverse the Ethiopian diasporic narratives selected in this
study. These are: i) disillusionment with various aspects and in various
forms, ii) a visit to the past (painful past memories), iii) racial
discrimination, along with conflict of identity and isolation, iv) interest or
involvement in homeland state of affairs, v) social and psychological
trauma of immigrants. Of these, three stand out in terms of the weight or
emphasis they are given. These are: i) racial discrimination, ii) conflict or
crisis of identity, iii) a revisit of the past (past memories) (Ibid., p.188).

Concluding that these are the major themes of the texts, he has not further investigated the
ideologies behind these negative consequences. But, it is indispensable to think about the
driving ideologies of the realities reflected in the texts in a reasonable manner. This, therefore, is
what the study at hand strives to achieve.

20
 Chapter Three: Theoretical Framework

As it has been stated in the methods and procedures section, the texts are approached from the
angles of theories of political philosophy. The rationale behind this is that it is difficult to
investigate political discourses rationally without using theories of political philosophy. The
prose narratives under this study are, in their own ways, actively involved in the political arena
of Ethiopia and beyond. The basic theories of Political philosophy (theories of state of nature,
divine right of kings, and social contract) are, therefore, used as theoretical frameworks on the
basis of the following conception:

There is a big difference between a novel or a poem and a philosophical

essay. Still, themes and ideas that might loosely be described as
“philosophical” are encountered throughout the world’s great literature.
Literature, after all, personifies human perspectives, thoughts, aspirations,
values and concerns. Often it is an immediate response to the current
human situation and human needs (Moore and Bruder, 2005:165).

Though the selected texts are written differently, they are commonly engaged in the realm of
politics by reflecting human situation through their own ideological planes. With regard to this,
Eagleton (2002: 16) views the link between literature and ideology from two dimensions: one
that, “…literature is nothing but ideology in a certain artistic form—that works of literature are
just expressions of ideologies of their time. They are prisoners of “self-consciousness”, unable to
reach beyond it to arrive at the truth…” while the second is a contradiction to the first for saying,
“…the opposite case seizes on the fact that so much literature actually challenges the ideological
assumptions of its time…yielding us insight into the realities which ideology hides from view.”
In either assertion, it is true that literature is highly related to ideology. The very important issue
here is to deal with whether literature hides or reveals the reality within the ideology of the
time— in this context the ideological plane.

Though the level of thought varies, human beings have tried to conceptualize their living in their
own ways. They have also reaped the consequences of their ideologies after which they decided
either to improve or retain their living styles. In doing so, they are highly guided by the inputs
that the human and natural environments have generously served them as Goodin and Pettit
(1997: 34) put it this way:

21
 Ideology is part of the deep structure of self-consciousness. By self-
consciousness I understand the capacity of human beings to conceive
themselves in relation to other humans, to human structures and
institutions, and to the non-human or natural environment, and to act in
light of these conceived relationships.
The above discourse has made everything clear that the relationship among human beings is a
conscious activity formulated with reference to other external factors. This formulation gives an
ideology /ideologies which guide people either collectively or individually. To better
comprehend these ideologies rationally, three major theories of political thought are used.

3.1 Theory of the State of Nature

This theory traces back to human nature and desire before any sort of distortion visited the raw
and unspoiled state of their being. Very confused by the frequent turmoil of social order of their
contemporary world, later political thinkers were forced to look into the “pre-institutionalized”
life of their early ancestors. Robertson (2002: 458) stated, “The state of nature is an imaginative
reconstruction of how human life and international relations might have been before the creation
of organized political society.” If one views this from its theoretical aspect, it definitely seems
very ideal, but the point is that the reflection of that sort of life vaguely happens to visit the
contemporary world regardless of what political nature they seem to have. In the state of nature,
everyone is free to act or behave in the way she/he feels good bothering no more to what
consequences the acts may have upon other fellow beings. There are two grand concepts on
which the theory of the state of nature is founded: man is born free, and everyone is naturally
equal. It is acknowledged by many political philosophers, like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau that
man is granted the two basic entities in the state of nature.

However, these thinkers have their own typical perspectives in life under this condition. As for
Hobbes, there is no significant difference among men in the state of nature. Citing Hobbes’s
work, Leviathan, Cahn (2003: 705) put the matter as, “Nature has made men equal, in the faculty
of body, and mind: as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in
body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between
man, and man, is not so considerable.” Hobbes further strengthens his thought that this equality
leads to autonomous acts of individuals without any sort of restriction. To live in harmony in the
22
state of nature, Hobbes proposed three important laws: peace seeking, being content, and
performing covenants that they made. If these rules fail functioning, he said, “People live in a
‘state of nature,’ a state of unbridled war of each against all, a state of chaos, mistrust, deception,
meanness, and violence in which each person stops at nothing to gain the upper hand, life is
‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’” (Moore and Bruder, 2005: 316). As stated by Cahn
(2003:703), Hobbes describes the nature of this life style as a condition characterized by the
absence of any form of political authority. He concludes that people in such a condition would be
‘perpetually at war, living in constant fear for their safety’ which significantly suggests for an
alternative political measure (i.e. submitting our natural rights to a sovereign and absolute
monarchy.)

On the contrary, Rousseau asserts that the ‘state of nature’ is the best system where man
exercises his natural rights in a full-fledged manner. “In the state of nature, in which there was
neither state nor civilization, people were essentially innocent, good, happy, and
healthy…enjoyed perfect freedom” (Moore and Bruder, 2005: 325). Rousseau, in his part, also
believes that the state of nature is highly impeded by external factors, mainly by ownership of
private property. This being inevitable, Rousseau contributed the ‘General Will’ as a medication
to the spoiled realm of the state of nature with a prime focus on collective liberty. In here, the
‘General Will’ gives the state a status of a “moral person” who acts without missing the interest
and right of the individual.

Similar to Hobbes and Rousseau, John Locke also celebrates the unconfined freedom of human
beings in the state of nature. As cited in Adams and Dyson (2007: 58-59), Locke says “…no one
is by nature or by the divine will subject to anyone else. All men are born equal; each individual
is, as it were, the sovereign ruler of his own person.” Unlike Hobbes and Rousseau, who stress
on positive rights, Locke acknowledges the importance of the negative rights because of his
conception of the natural law for which we willingly compromise some of our natural rights. He
believes that it is not because of an external pressure that we do so, rather because that we are,
naturally, rational beings who know what is good and bad. This is explicitly put by Moore and
Bruder (2005) in the following way:

23
 Locke, unlike Hobbes, believed there is a natural moral law that is more
than a set of practical principles for survival. According to Locke, we are
all made by God and are his “property.” It logically follows that we are
obliged to preserve ourselves and, as far as possible, the rest of
humankind. Accordingly, except for the sake of just punishment, no
person may take away or impair another’s “life, liberty, health, limbs or
goods,” or anything which these various items may depend. That no
person may destroy or impair another’s life, liberty, or property requires,
according to Locke, that each person has inalienable and natural rights and
duties. They are inalienable and natural in that their existence is entailed
by the fact that we are God’s creations (p: 320).

Having this in mind, Locke advises that it is difficult to live in a state of nature without
compromising some of our instinct driven natural rights. He also shares Hobbes’s ideas that
living in such a condition results in a total destruction of all because of the war of everyone
against every other one. But, still, Locke is not as pessimist as Hobbes on this regard; their
solution to this not to happen clearly shows that the former (Locke) is very optimistic.
Concluding that there is no another way to control the universal war, Hobbes prescribed an
absolute monarchy to be situated on the political tower and exercise his power unquestionably by
considering the “interest” of the people. But later, Locke questioned the self-contradicting
solution proposed by Hobbes for an absolute monarchy was not made, and even could not be
made accountable when the interest of the mass is not respected. This itself is found to be open
to another war of the people against the monarchy. In a very different manner, Locke put a
solution which is to date functioning, at least theoretically, in a handful of “modern democratic”
countries all over the world. Cahn (2003) put this as:

Like Hobbes, John Locke believes that people in the state of nature would
consent to live under a political authority. But, unlike Hobbes, he does not
think that they would choose subjection to an absolute sovereign. He
argues instead that individuals in a state of nature would agree to form a
representative democracy characterized by a majority rule (p: 703).

Both Locke and Rousseau share the idea that the best way out from the consequences of the state
of nature is founding a democratic government whose engine is the will of people. However,
these thinkers have a very basic difference in their conception of democracy which, in fact, has
become acceptable today: for Rousseau, the “general will” will be a reality if and only if direct
democracy is practiced whereas for Locke the modern large states can run their business
24
effectively through indirect democracy—by few representing the mass and reflecting collective
interest through majority rule and minority rights.

In general, the failure in practicing the three laws as per Hobbes, emergence of ownership of
private property as per Rousseau, and the inalienable natural rights and duties granted by God as
per Locke forced human beings to find another institutionalized political organization for which
some natural rights are sacrificed and from which a ‘General Good’ is reaped. This is what all
the three agreed to call it a Social Contract. Though there are several variants of the social
contract, say “Absolute Sovereign” of Hobbes, “Moral Person” of Rousseau, and
“Representative Democracy” of Locke, all agree that the collective interest of people is a
priority. But, historically, man did not directly come from the state of nature to the social
contract; there is the divine right of kings in the middle.

3.2 The Divine Right Theory

This theory justifies that there are some divinely selected individuals who can effectively and
unquestionably regulate the political system in a society. Roberston (2002: 152) states, “The
divine right of kings to rule their realms was a vital political and theological doctrine in the
medival Europe, and political theorists… were more or less committed to the doctrine.” The
basement of this kind of political conception is derived from the combination of these three
major laws identified by Thomas Aquinas: eternal law—God’s rules on the world for divine
reasons; divine law—rules gifted to man by God for supernatural goals; and natural law—
application of eternal law by earthly on earth (Moore and Bruder, 2005: 314 ). Though the
experiences in various countries may vary, the kings commonly are accountable only to God, not
to people. Therefore, no one claims to take their power in a peaceful manner; they either transfer
it to their kinsmen or die with it.

The other challenge that people face in this kind of political system is that the kings in power do
not act according to the laws. When people are found guilty, the king punishes; but when the
king is found guilty, it is God who is expected to punish him. But, when the subjects consciously
understand that no punishment comes from God, they also understand that the laws are not from
God, rather from a godly man. This theory of political philosophy, to a minimum, serves as a
transitional bridge from the state of nature to the social contract. As a way out from this political

25
realm, Aquinas also added the fourth law—human law, which is formulated on the basis of
natural law. This human law, therefore, is the first step to the social contract.

Literature, either as a reflection of social reality, or critical interpretation about the world and all
within it, or a mere fantasy through imagination, talks about the situations in the state of nature,
divine rights and social contract.

3.3 The Social Contract Theory

Though political philosophers imaginatively reconstructed the life style of human beings in a
state of nature, they believe that it is inevitable to live within a politically organized community
for which you lose something, and from which you gain something. Most of the philosophers
believe that, man whether he likes or not, has experienced political life with his fellow
community, but the issue was debatable with reference to the community of other animals. With
regard to this, Bird (2006) states:
Humans are not, as Aristotle noted, political animals in the way that ants
and bees are, simply programmed by natural instincts to organize
themselves in certain iterating structures like nests and hives. Rather, our
political communities and institutional practices take many incompatible
forms, and people have differed sharply on their relative merits (p: 15).
Accepting the idea that we are political communities different from non-human animal
communities, and thereby improving the variants of social contract by inclining to a higher
degree to that of Locke, “modern democratic” states claim that it is the consent of the general
people who put the power holders in power. On the other hand, there are also individuals and
institutions who blame that those who are in power are physically liberal but internally absolute
sovereigns. When this is seen from the mirror of social contract, there is a gap between the
contract giver and contract taker. Since the stepping stone of the theory of social contract is the
theory of state of nature, the contract is primarily taken as an agreement between individuals.
Regarding this, Hoffman (2007: 170) asserted, “The concept (social contract) points to the
formation of the state as a result of contract between individuals.” However, the individuals in a
state of nature and in a social contract are quite different: the former lives in a situation where
there is a perfect freedom and equality in which power and jurisdiction are exercised in
reciprocity, whereas the later lives in a situation of moral laws which are constructed by society
on the basis of natural law. Hence, in a social contract, there is no reciprocity, rather rationality
26
and legislation. An individual in social contract has willingly reduced some of his/her positive
rights, and replaced them by some human laws which are believed to bring a common good.
However, it is being an idealist to expect the social contract to be blameless for it is the sum total
of those imperfect ideas of many individuals. After all, Rousseau believes that man is naturally
innocent, but society distorts him once he became part of the reconstructed system. His famous
statement, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” states that society is the source of
man’s misery because of the advent of corruption, exploitation, and domination imposed on him
by others. Though they always happen everywhere in history, social contract is aware of these
problems and tries to tackle them for they are common evils as opposed to common merits. For
this reason, the social contract theory is appreciated by many. “The great strength of this idea
(social contract) is that individuals can and must act rationally as equals, since the notion of
contract provides a sense of exchange. Individuals need to consent to government and authorize
acts that are made in their names” (Ibid., p. 170).

However, a serious problem cripes up when the question ‘Is man rational?’ is raised. As we can
understand from Hoffman, the normative view ‘must’ is very different from the metaphysical
‘is’; hence, the ideas ‘man must act rationally’ and ‘man acts rationally’ are basically different.
So far, this question on the rationality of man was and is an agenda of hot debate. Aristotle
asserts that man is a “rational animal” while others like Rousseau stress that man is “not
essentially rational and social.” Peikoff (1991) has come up with a dozen of ideas about the issue
at hand from many celebrated individuals that history has produced, and put them as brief as
follows:

Many thinkers and artists have sought to answer this question. They have
looked at men and offered a report on man’s nature. Their reports have
clashed through the ages. Aristotle defined man as the ‘rational animal.’
Plato and the medievals described other worldly souls trapped in a bodily
prison. Shakespeare dramatized man as an aspiring but foolish mortal,
defeated by “tragic flaw.” Thomas Hobbes described a mechanistic brute.
Kant saw man as a blind chunk of unreality, in hock to the unknowable.
Hegel saw a half-real fragment of the state. Victor Hugo saw a passionate
individualist undercut by inimical universe. Friedrich Nietzsche saw a
demoniacal individualist run by the will to power. John Dewey saw a
piece of flux run by the expediency of the moment. Sigmund freud spoke
of an excrement-molding pervert itching to rape his mother (p: 187).

27
From the above discourse, one can conclude that man is perceived as rational, semi-rational, and
irrational by different intellectuals. From these views, it is also possible to talk about a society as
a summation of the individuals who are entitled by either one or a combination of the above
entities. Therefore, life in a social contract is very complex, and the rational act of an individual
has to be questioned. Here, we need to raise the concept of ‘Ideological plane’ for it deals with
the level of reality of the thoughts we are led by, and the events we surely claim for taking place.
Hence, in literature, specifically in prose narratives, authors raise political issues that their reality
is not supported by a well researched empirical data. Thus, we cannot blindly say that this is true,
but that one is false since they could be, or most probably are ideologically reconstructed.
The best way, therefore, is to investigate the level of the thoughts and experiences with reference
to what we believe is good or bad if it happens to us.

To clearly show how ideology appears in literature, Ngara (1985: 5) has put two angles of vision.
The first angle focuses on the interaction between the dominant ideology of the higher class, and
the competing ideologies of the other classes; and the second is the ideological stance of the
writer which shows his/her attitude towards the interaction of the other ideologies and practices.
All of these (i.e. higher class, middle class, lower class, and the writers) are part and parcel of the
social contract, and their thoughts and practices inevitably fit to rationality, semi-rationality and
irrationality. But this doesn’t mean that they cannot ideally put themselves in the world of the
state of nature. Hence, to get advantage of the good things raised in stereotyped texts, and to
criticize those unwanted ideas, examining the ideological plane of the texts is the best remedy.

For the remedy to be effective, thoughts and practices of human beings in the worlds of state of
nature, divine right of kings and social contract have to be examined by four specific elements:
liberty, democracy, equality, and justice. These basic elements in political philosophy are by
themselves political theories in political science. For political science deals with the empirical
political arena of this physical world, its scholars referred back to what political philosophers
have ideally achieved, and made them scientific theories to run their ideologies in the ways they
want.

As it has been stated in the preceding section, literature, either as a reflection of social reality, or
a critical interpretation about the world and all within it, or a mere fantasy through imagination,

28
talks about the situations within the state of nature, divine right of kings and social contract. In
one way or another, writers substantiate their works with political themes; they could support or
oppose the system under their discourses. The very important issue here is that politicians do
their works; people react; writers produce their texts—all in the way they believe; but, what
about readers? Readers need to examine the ideological plane—level of thoughts and practices.
To examine those political thoughts and practices, and to accept the good and reject the bad, one
needs to know the basic theories of political philosophy to a minimum. Otherwise, accepting
political texts as far as they are in line with one’s interest or rejecting them based on simple
stereotypes may mean closing our mental gates to knowledge and research. The next chapter,
therefore, is expected to justify this position of the researcher.

29
 Chapter Four: Analysis and Interpretation of Ideological Plane
in the Target Texts

4.1 Introduction
This chapter deals with the analysis and interpretation of ideological plane of the four
selected texts. To provide general information about the texts under study, the analysis of
each text starts with its brief summary. Then, identifying the major ideologies that are
reflected in the texts is dealt with. The main work, however, is done with regard to the
political philosophies behind the stated ideologies. After dealing with the analysis of all the
texts, a comparative analysis of political philosophy is made so as to see the commonalities
and differences among the four works.

4.2 Analysis of Ideological Plane in Beneath the Lion’s Gaze

4.2.1 Summary of the Text
Beneath the Lion’s Gaze is one among the diasporic Ethiopian novels written in the English
language. The author, Maaza Mengistie, has done her best in portraying the situation of Ethiopia
and Ethiopians during the last days of Emperor Haile Selasie, and the whole image of life in the
Military Government of the Derg regime.

The text is presented in four parts; book one, book two, book three, and book four. Book one
starts with a very horrifying image of a boy, who was shot by bullet on his back. This is the time
when many revolutionary students were killed by soldiers of the king; those who escaped death
were also taken to the few nearby hospitals as emergency cases. The revolutionary students, as
educated members of the exploited society, raised very critical political and economic issues for
which the emperor and his senior officials were not able to give solutions.

Politically, the power of the king was unquestionable since he used to believe that he was elect of
God through his Solomonic line of kingship. Economically, the peasants of the various rural
areas of the country were suffering from the exploitation posed upon them by the parochial
leaders. Tenancy, traditional method of plowing, and drought impoverished the people to death,
but the king could not give solutions. Following the reverberation of the Wollo famine on media,

30
the then students mobilized the city people by hanging the famous motto of the days, “Land to
the Tiller.” Finally, the students, the military, and the people openly protested against the king,
and brought him to his end. Then the military came to power without the consent of the students
and the mass. This enabled the people to predict that having a civilian government was to be
unthinkable in the realm of the Derg.

The other three consecutive books (parts) of the novel concentrate on the coming of the Derg
with its Marxist-Leninist ideology, which promised the people to an overdose. When the regime
failed fulfilling its promises, the mass started challenging it; and the only thing that the junta
could do was terrorizing the people. Young activists, like Dawit, worried so much for not seeing
the fruit of their relentless effort that they started in overthrowing the king. In these books (parts)
of the novel, we can see three phases: first, the coming of the Derg with promises, the massacre
of high ranking officials and the disillusionment of young intellectuals; second, the rise and
attack of the guerrillas, and Derg’s response—“Red Terror”; third, the frustration of the Derg and
the dominance of the fighters, like Mekonnen (Dawit)—killer of soldiers, Anbessa—destroyer of
roadblocks, and Solomon the wise. People dared to call them “The Holy Trinity” because of their
achievement in forcing the Derg to its end. This novel, however, does not tell us anything that
happened in the aftermath of the Derg.

4.2.2 The Inviolability of the Throne

In this book, the author has put the ideologies of the time: the dominant and the alternative
ideologies. The first part, which is one-third of the whole, is about the challenges that the
emperor faced and his image in the general public. The dominant ideology portrayed in this part
of the novel is Feudo-capitalism. When we come to power, the king used to claim that he had
inviolable right to the throne. The ideological plane behind this claim is, therefore, better seen
when the political philosophy of the day is deeply studied by using the theories of political
philosophy.

31
 4.2.2.1 The Source of Political Power of the King
The appropriate theory on which the political philosophy of the day was based is found to be the
theory of the divine right of kings. This theory makes its center on the notion that the king is
elect of God. With regard to the conception of this theory, the very important question that needs
to be answered is the way how subjects could know whether the king is really elect of God or
not. To answer this question, it is important to see the king’s perception about his power and the
people’s reaction to that perception. Now let us have the following extract from the text to see
what this looks like in this specific study:
Once, I was beloved of God, the king of kings. I was the conquering Lion
of Judah, a descendent of king Dawit. My blood rich and red, is kin to that
other king of kings, the most Beloved. I ruled my kingdom in honor of
His. We were as we were because He was. In this kingdom of men, angels
walked amongst us, flesh and spirit side by side, fiery swords next to
spears. Wings beat back bullets, bent Italian rifles, flattened tanks. Under a
poisonous rain dripping from war planes flying as low as insects, we have
run and triumphed, shielded by feathers, our skin still whole and splendid
under the sun. Abyssinia. Saba’s blessed children multiplied, scattered into
hillsides and castles, buried in obelisks and caves, mummified as perfectly
as pharaohs. Ethiopia, the most loved of the Beloved, do you hear the
drums above the clouds? Do you know that angels approach, and they
come for you? Mercy will be no more for this blasphemy against us. There
will be the day, Beloved, when we will rise again, and a divine rage will
pour itself on you and we will not stop the tide, though you will beg. And
after the storm, after the cleansing, we will open our arms again, and you
will come, eager once more, and angels will guide our next steps, and we
will move together (Maaza, 2010: 107).

This discourse portrays the king’s praying during that critical moment on which his power was at
the verge of being snatched. From this, the only way we can know that the king is elect of God
is that he is a descendant of king Dawit of Isreal, father of king Solomon. The king claims that
all of Abyssinians are children of Saba, thus, children of Solomon since Saba’s child is the son of
Solomon. As per the above extract, the Abyssinian kingdom was believed to be under the
supervision and intervention of God and his angels—“flesh and spirit side by side.” Having
these ideas from the king’s view is very indispensable for the ideas are very much near to the
system’s state machinery. However, this does not assure the legitimacy of the ideology without
looking into the reaction of the then community of the state. As revealed in the text, there are two
groups: those who submissively accept the authority of the king, and those who actively oppose
32
the oppression and the mystification of the whole system. The extract below shows the
submissiveness of a section of people under the monarchy:

But now, there was this call, and Mickey found himself ordered to assume
duties no mortal would have wanted. The emperor was God’s chosen, that
the blood of king Solomon and king Dawit flowed in his veins, and
mickey imagined that anyone who dared to corner and trap one of God’s
own, who dared to defile the divine blood, was committing a blasphemous
act for which there would be no forgiveness (Ibid., p. 62).
This extract depicts the extent to which people, including few young revolutionaries, regard the
king as unquestioned let alone to be a candidate of death by the ‘subjects’ of the day. They also
believe that the king has the legitimacy of ruling his subjects on the basis of the fact that it was
God’s consent for Isreal to be ruled by Dawit and his son Solomon. The issue of power in the
context of divine right of kings is better discussed by the two famous scholars –St. Augustine
and St. Thomas Aquinas.

According to Augustine, any form of state is the result of sin. This scholar believes that no man
is given the right to control and rule other human beings: God has given man the power to rule
and use only beasts. He also strongly believes that we human beings in the state of nature are
equal and free (Adams and Dyson, 2007: 24). When Haile Selasie’s regime is seen from this
angle, it does not recognize the natural freedom and equality of human beings since only those
who have Solomonic blood in their veins are privileged over those who are not. The power
relation between the king and the subjects is, therefore, not an earthly issue to be dealt with, due
to the reason that the subjects are not allowed to intervene in the works of God and his
“beloved”—it is a “blasphemous act for which there would be no forgiveness.” This, however,
is the ideology of the dominant class and of those who submissively surrender their freedom for
the good of those who are in power. Augustine also asserts that once man has rejected his
freedom by transgressing the law of God, he has to be obediently ruled by those who are in
power. Everyone who comes to power comes by the consent of God; and if he/she mistreats
people, the people should not say anything. They should, instead, suffer the consequences
without questioning the divine authority.

As viewed from the angle of Augustine’s philosophy, though Haile Selasie failed recognizing
the natural freedom and equality of his subjects with himself and his kinsmen, he is given the
33
legitimacy not to be accountable for whatever he did. According to this thought, there is no body
except God who questions the power of the king. The major character and supporter of the king,
Dr. Hailu, says to his son, “what can you do to take down an entire government? You have
eighteen years, the emperor has three thousand (p: 38).” This speech strengthens the
impossibility of taking power from the hand of a regime that has stayed for long by divine
willingness. The emperor’s ideology about his coming to power is different from that of
Augustine’s philosophy: for Augustine, the king himself is one among the sinners because the
reason for the formation of the states, just or unjust, is the original sin. On the contrary, Haile
Selasie believes that he is blessed and chosen by God for being a descendant of king Dawit.
What makes the king’s ideology compatible with Augustine’s thought is that no one is allowed
to take the power of the king regardless of the countless evils that the king may commit. It is God
and only God who has the authority to question the king, and to take measures when necessary.
Therefore, the ideological plane of the day during the last Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia is
partly Augustinian when viewed from the position of the higher class.

The other important figure in the theory of divine right of kings is St. Thomas Aquinas. This
religious person and political thinker makes his basement on the existence of laws that regulate
our entire lives. Unlike Augustine, Aquinas believes that the state is a copy of the huge universe
that God regulates it with the eternal law. Therefore, no one has the right and the capacity either
to elect God as a ruler to the world or to take back his power if something wrong happens to the
universe. The king is also elect of God, and no one has the right to question his power except
when he violates the rules of God.

4.2.3 The Reaction against the Power of the King

With regard to overthrowing the king, Augustine and Aquinas do have different, and even
opposite stands. Augustine argues that a king who did not come to power by consent of people
could not be overthrown by the people. Even though the ruler kills people, snatches their
property, and forces them to worship idols, they do not have the right to step him down from his
power: it is God who gave him the power, and it is up to Him whether to take measures or not.
On the contrary, Aquinas asserts that people should obey the king as far as the king obeys God.
But if the king is observed violating the laws, the people should not obey him. However,
Individual disobedience will not have the strength in dethroning the ruler; therefore, there have
34
to be organized people for this purpose. In our case, the Ethiopian people chose that of
Aquinas’s. The reaction against the king is described in the following way:
His(Yonas’s) father’s statement reminded him of one of the few fights
they’d had, fourteen years ago. It had been in 1960s. He was eighteen then
and the country was at the height of a coup attempt. Two brothers had
waited until the emperor had flown out of the country to stage their
rebellion with the help of the Imperial Bodyguard. The Neway Brothers.
One was a brigadier general, the other a graduate of Columbia University
in America. Yonas had believed in the brash and vivid dreams of these
courageous brothers, had taken up their galvanizing calls for change and
marched with full-throated shouts through the streets of Addis Ababa (p:
37-38).
The youngsters’, especially the Neway brothers’ change oriented coup is a lesson to the new
generation, and it enabled them to understand that it is better to suffer the consequences of
fighting for change rather than suffering the consequences of unchanging system of exploitation
and deception. Thus, these brothers and their fellowmen determined to terminate the king’s
unbounded season of kingship by investing their lives. Though they did not bring immediate
changes, their struggle later became an ingredient to the collapse of the emperor. This is stated in
the target text as:

But Yonas believed until the very end, even as the country watched a
poorly planned coup turned into a bloody showdown. In a matter of days,
the Neway brothers and their men were dead, three of the corpses,
including one of the brothers, Germame Neway, hanged, then put on
display in St. Giogrgis Square as a warning. All hopes of change had been
extinguished with them, but the rumblings left by their calls for revolt had
managed to snake their way from 1960 to 1974 (p: 38).

The above discourse shows that the massacre of the brothers is not a divine punishment, rather a
technical problem related to poor planning of the coup. It also indicates that the blood of these
change agents was not shed in vain: it paved the way for the revolution of the 1974—the time in
which the emperor was deposed from power. It is also because of this reason that the young
revolutionary students were also fighting against the feudal system by investing their precious
lives to death. From this, one can understand that it is Aquinas’s political thought that became a
reality in the Ethiopian context as revealed in the novel under study. However, both in
Augustinian and Aquinasian philosophy, there is no such a thing called democratic way of
transferring state power to the successors. The competing ideology, which forcefully brought the
35
deep-rooted regime to its end, is Marxism Leninism. The main issues that the revolutionary
students had raised in the course of their struggle against the Feudo-Capitalist ideology of the
monarchy are treated next to this.

4.2.4 Feudo-Capitalism Vs Marxism-Leninism

In the state of nature, no one came to this world with property; rather nature itself served
people its eternal treasures in abundance. Thus, everyone is equally privileged to use what
is in her/his disposal. But as Rousseau strongly asserted, it is when private ownership of
property was started that the conducive environment of the state of nature was spoiled once
and for all. Accepting the selfish nature of human beings and its effect on property
ownership, John Locke clearly rationalized the concept of ownership of property in depth.
He argues that nature has served everything to everyone equally; therefore, no one could
claim ownership of what nature provides without adding the value of her/his labour to it.
This means that property ownership is possible if and only if man invests something of
only his own, mostly labour to what is naturally to his disposal. Beyond this, whatever
effort and labour a man invests to nature, he has to own only what is enough for good life.
On the contrary, if he strives to accumulate more than what is needed, he has to know that
he is living at the expense of others’ security (Cahn, 2003: 736). Based on this, the friction
between the higher class and the lower class as revealed in this text, and the Marxist
Leninist ideology of the young revolutionaries is going to be the central issue of the next
sub-section.

4.2.4.1 Land Tenure and Economy in the Feudal System

The very reason of treating these two interrelated issues under a separate sub-section is to
show their role in the Ethiopian political system of the last monarchy. These issues also
serve as benchmarks to the next discussion on denial of justice. Above all, land and
economy were the main causes of ideological and physical struggle in the country during
the government under consideration. People’s questions about these fundamental issues
were very sound and provoking by far stronger than the questions of power. To understand
this better, it is important to see the content of Mickey’s letter written to Dawit:
This farmer plows land that isn’t his, that was never his father’s, which
was never his grandfather’s, and will never be his son’s. He works as hard
36
 as his animals day after day to pay a landowner’s taxes and to glean
enough crops so his family has enough grains for food after they’ve given
the landowner his share. The landowner’s share is always large. It is
always more than the landowner needs. It is a selfish share created by a
selfish system that preys on the weak and makes them servants to the rich.
Dawit, we live in a feudal system. Our country exploits those who work
the hardest to stay alive. Our emperor has built the myth of these truths. Is
this my country? (p: 28-29).

The discourse given here above is very comprehensive pieces which has a potential of surveying
the very critical issues to be discussed in this study. Primarily, Mickey raises the issue of
ownership of land, and states that the farmers, their forefathers, and even their children had not
the right to claim ownership of the plot of land they had rented from the so-called landowners.
When we start from the state of nature, there is no such a thing called ownership of private
property. Even in the privatized world, as Locke says, ownership is possible to those who mix
the fruit of their effort to what is naturally available. In this case, the right of ownership is
exclusively given to or taken by the landlords, who in fact, mixed nothing to what nature served
them. On the other hand, those who “work as their animals” are denied the right to own even a
small fragment of land for which they add their sweating blood.

Because of this misplacement of property ownership, the landlords used to force the farmers to
take the lion’s share from their hands. This sort of exploitation was officially guaranteed as it
was entitled a tax payment. Even taxes, as per Locke, should be paid by the rational consent of
the payers, not by external pressure from authorities. He argues that man is rational and knows
that the accumulated resource in the form of tax both in cash and kind will help to foster public
services; hence, he voluntarily pays what he is asked by the authorities. For anything beyond
this, man has no duty to pay any form of tax. But in this text, the farmers pay the tax because
they are forced to do so. They even know that what they pay always goes to the private treasures
of the landlords, not to the treasures of the central government.

As it is explicitly stated, the dominant ideology of the day is feudo-capitalism. In Mickey’s letter,
it is frequently stated as “the selfish system” and “the feudal system”. The term “selfish system”
refers to capitalism; the term “feudal system” also shows that the base of the capitalist system is
land not industry. The innocent and poor farmers in this system of the time were extremely
exploited by the rich landowners. Since the greater share of the produce was taken by their lords,
37
poverty to the farmers became inevitable. This system, therefore, made thousands of citizens
victims of hunger and injustice. This effect is best described by Mickey in the following way:

We have grown up together, Dawit, I was someone else before you knew
me. My father was this farmer from the south, he died on a rich man’s plot
of land tied to the wrong end of his plow because he’d been forced to sell
his cattle to keep his family that harvest. My father died like an animal,
still tied to those ropes when I found him, swallowing with his last breaths
the dust of another man’s land, broken by the burden of his labor. The rich
think this land is theirs though they have never earned the right to call it
theirs. Not like these farmers. Not like my father. Most of those who are
here, on the ground dying, are the ones who were strong enough to walk
out of their villages and get here. The roads are littered with our people
who died on the way, their bodies rotting in the sun if the vultures haven’t
gotten to them first. We dishonor our dead and our workers, Dawit. The
rich have kept this secret, the emperor has stolen this truth from us and we
have to fight to get our country back and save these people. A man told me
today as many as two hundred thousand will die. They will die. It is too
late for them. Do we even have as many alive in Addis Ababa? (P: 29).
This Marxist Leninist young revolutionary fighter has clearly depicted the misery of life in the
feudo-capitalist system of the monarchy. To clearly see the ideological plane of the content of
Mickey’s letter, it is very important to consider the basic components of political philosophy:
liberty, democracy, equality, and justice. To deal with the first, Isaiah Berlin’s the “two concepts
of liberty” is preferred because of its comprehensive nature. According to Berlin, liberty is of
two types: positive and negative. Positive liberty is based on the stand that man is rational and
always chooses what is good for him—he never chooses what harms him. A man of this stand
argues that man is a master of himself. On the other hand, negative liberty is based on the stand
that no one should interfere in others’ choice no matter what the consequence of the choice will
be (Goodin and pettit, 1997: 373-397).

When we come to Mickey, he has put that people are mistreated, starved, and caused to death
because of the landlords’ intervention through forcing them to pay more than what is left in their
hands. Therefore, this indicates that Mickey emphasizes to the negative liberty of his people. He
is not interested in discussing whether the people, if they are not intervened, are self-sufficient or
not. This is to mean that other factors exclusively related to the farmers in the absence of
government related factors are not raised. What is not answered in the discourse is that, if

38
everything is smoothened, do the farmers have the capacity to tackle the problems without any
sort of government intervention? If the answer is “yes”, the source of the recurrent drought and
famine solely goes to the government; if the answer is “no”, the farmers themselves have to be
equally blamed for the ill consequences they faced with. However, Mickey simply informed his
friend Dawit that the exploitation of the emperor and his rich landlords caused the misery and
death of thousands without deeply dealing with the issues of liberty and equality. Therefore, the
ideological plane of Mickey’s Marxism Leninism is limited only to showing the unjust economic
relations of the farmers and the landlords.

4.2.4.2 Denial of Justice

The idea of exploitation is highly related to justice. However, the concept of justice is very much
diversified. Based on Locke’s concept of distribution, John Rawls has developed the Theory of
Justice in a very critical manner. Believing that man has basic liberties that cannot be
compromised, he says that social and economic inequalities can be arranged for the benefit of all
people (Moore and Burder, 2005: 335-372). In the Ethiopian case, the novel shows that the great
mass of wealth was concentrated in the hands of the unproductive higher class. It is this inability
of arranging the economic factors that caused the death of thousands of citizens. On the other
hand, Robert Rozick argues that privatization through just procedures of acquisition and transfer
is better than distribution (Ibid., p. 423). With regard to the text under consideration, this basic
argument of liberal democracy is beyond the reach of the activists. Due to the political nature of
the time, discussing about the justness and the unjustness of the procedures of acquisition and
transfer was not apriority in the Ethiopian context; the prime solution, if possible, was insisting
on distribution. This idea of Rozick is also challenged by Cohen, who believes that common
property ownership is basic to ensure justice. He argues that privatization increases the freedom
of the owner by decreasing the freedom of the non-owner (Ibid., p. 431).

The young revolutionaries, however, do not exactly match with any of the above celebrated
political thinkers. This is to mean that they are not able to come up with immediate solutions
which they believe are more just than what they observed and experienced. What they did is
simply informing the sort of injustice practiced by the regime: no one among them suggested
Rawls’ distribution, or Rozick’s privatization, or Cohen’s common ownership. But Cohen’s

39
criticism of privatization says much about the problem between the landowners and the farmers.
The novel also shows that denial of justice results in the inverse relationship of freedom of the
owner and non-owner. Thus, the increase in the landowners’ freedom to use the product of their
land causes a decrease in the farmers’ freedom in getting the appropriate share value of their
labour. With regard to private ownership, Locke has done much better than others. He justifies
privatization if and only if natural objects are mixed with human labour that can add value to the
object: even this should not be to the extent of exploiting others. This issue of private ownership
is raised by Mickey as, “The rich think this land is theirs though they have never earned the right
to call it theirs” (p: 29).

In addition to this, some extracts show the negative impact of not sharing. This by implication,
not explicitly, shows that Rawls’ idea of distribution for the good of the aggregate is essential.
Now, let us see some of the extracts which have this implication:

He shoved a pamphlet in his hand. On one side of the pamphlet was a

photo of a starving child with painfully swollen limbs. On the other,
Emperor Haile Selasie fed his Chihuahua meat from a silver platter
(p: 34).
It is a selfish share created by selfish system that preys on the weak and
makes them servants of the rich (P: 28).

Soldiers rebelled in the north because they don’t have clean water to drink
while the emperor’s officers get beer and wine (p: 34).
The above extracts implicitly indicate that there is a need to distribute the unfairly accumulated
resources in the hands of the king and the rich landlords. In each extract, there is a binary
opposion of the advantaged and disadvantaged: emperor and child, rich and poor, and officers
and soldiers—in all pairs, the former is advantaged while the later is disadvantaged. However,
the young revolutionists do not have a clear stand on property or resource acquisition of their
fellow people. Their emotional reaction against the existing situation did not give them time to
think what to do. Mickey says, “They are starving here in Wollo, Dawit. They are starving in
Tigre and Shoa. We have lived in the city and we have forgotten about these people” (p: 28).

40
As the ideological plane shows, the Marxist Leninist ideology of the youngsters sways without a
clear foundation. It is clear that the students are progressive, and are also keen to see immediate
changes.

This strong interest of these young revolutionists is stated in the target text as:
“students…demand action to address the country’s poverty and lack of progress. They asked
again and again when Ethiopia’s backwardness slide into the middle ages would stop” (p: 6-7).

4.2.4.3 Denial of Democracy

Basically, the students’ questions were not only questions of economic justice, but also questions
of democracy and regime change. Whatever question was asked at any rate by the progressive
young intellectuals, the old system did not have any room to entertain the questions. From the
above short discourse, one can understand two continuous and opposite journeys: the country’s
slide to the situation of the middle age for non-stop, and the students’ progressive questions
which were asked again and again to push the authorities to take measures. Understanding that
the students’ questions were basic, the then Prime Minister of the country informed the king how
strong their movement was, and hopelessly announced his decision of quitting his position to the
emperor in a very laborious way as follows:
“It is mutiny,” Prime Minister Aklilu said. He’d kept his head low, his
eyes lower, his small mouth was pursed in a thin line. His blue suit,
tailored by an Armenian he’d had trained in Paris, sat perfectly on his
broad shoulders; the feet was impeccable. In his hands was an envelope.
“Your Majesty”—his voice was clear, only his soft eyes betrayed his
emotions—“they want a change, they want a new cabinet, and things will
only get worse until they see something. I respectfully and regretfully give
you my resignation. I see no other way,” (p: 32).
Here emerges the fruit of the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Hobbes
believes that men are equal and free without restriction in the state of nature, whereas Locke
argues that the equality and freedom in the state of nature has to be in line with natural law.
These philosophers agree that life in the state of nature is full of turmoil and terror; thus, they
recommend their own typical variants of social contract. In relation to the above discourse, we
can see which recommendation is better. Hobbesian recommendation lectures people to form a
sovereign and absolute monarchy who willingly could respect their interests, but against whom
they have no right to protest if he fails respecting their interest. However, the difference is that
41
the power of the Ethiopian monarch is heavenly, which is based on the divine right of kings,
while the power of the Hobbesian monarch is earthly that is based on social contract. This can be
better understood from Prime Minister Aklilu; he knows the problem of the emperor and the
interest of the people. But, since there was no democracy, he preferred resignation to raising the
proper questions of the students.

Above all, the Prime Minister’s resignation is accompanied by a very humble tone, regret and
respect. Let alone to have the right to challenge the king and dethrone him from power, Aklilu’s
right of deciding to provide a resignation proposal was at the mercy of the emperor. Aklilu had to
rather acknowledge the king saying, ‘It is with a profound sadness that I submit this letter. You
have been a father to me, my education could not have been if not for you. I have had the honor
of serving this country at home and abroad, I have been blessed to stand before the United
Nations and to assist the reunification of our country’ (p: 32). With regard to this, Locke asserts
that once an absolute monarch came to power, it is difficult to take power from him by any
means, except by war. This, as to him, is not basically different from the situation in state of
nature. It is because of this that the Prime Minister, an influential figure, was not able to question
the power of the king; this happened because of denial of democracy even at a higher level.

However, the minister’s letter is very basic, for it was able to show both the resignation of a high
rank official and the revolution of young intellectuals at the same time; this was the worst news
to the king though he was committed not to improve as per the requests. This rigidity continued
parallel to the heightened revolution of the new generations till the last surrender of the emperor
by the military junta as stated below:

Sign here, and here, no time to read, we must hurry, trust us. Don’t sit,
there is no rest. We must show that change is coming. Don’t you hear your
people? The emperor stood. The emperor walked. The emperor followed
the backs of the uniformed men from one meeting into another. What has
become of us? He asked himself. When will angels lead us out of this
fray? Emperor Haile Selasie tried his best to become immobile. To stand
rigid without following. To sit without signing. To watch without nodding,
without expression, without revealing the panic that fluttered through him.
But things kept moving forward. We must not be anything other than what
we are, he reminded himself. We are and so we will be. We are here, in
these days of locusts and noise, but it has been written that this shall pass,
and so it will (p: 42).
42
The above extract shows the forced dethroning of the emperor and the coming to power of the
Military Government of the Derg. The statement, “The emperor followed the backs of the
uniformed men from one meeting into another,” indicates the fact that power is on its shifting
stage to military. But, where are the students? Where are the actual roots of the revolution?
Putting the students to the periphery, the junta took power; the students, and the people in
general were injected a painkiller that a civilian government will come soon. Anyone who
intended to oppose the junta was a victim of the “Red Terror”. According to Locke, these are the
evil consequences that emerge as absolute sovereigns come and go. This leads us to the
dissatisfaction of the people and their new steps to another struggle.

4.2.5 Disillusionment of the People and the New Struggle

After investing all their relentless effort to overthrow the emperor from power, the civilians were
snatched the fruit of their labour. They expected, as per the “promise” or “deception,” that a
civilian government will come; but they saw no sign of it. This forced the people to lose
confidence on the new government. In this transitional period, Hobbes’s concept of “war of each
against all” in the state of nature was experienced by the people. The new government, instead of
stabilizing the situation, was a very active participant in the turmoil using its state-sponsored
violence. This immediately resulted in civilians’ disillusionment on the one hand, and a
germination of new struggle on the other hand. The struggle was specifically inspired by lack of
liberty and justice, which caused the disillusionment.

4.2.5.1 Public Insecurity

Basically, the new revolutionary struggle against the new military government did not have a
different ideology rather than Marxism Leninism. The basic cause of friction between the two is
the issue of Security, which is also the root cause for public disillusionment. As soon as the
military took power, the senior officials of the monarchy were systematically and deceptively
hunted. Maaza stated the event this way:
Soon, the voices floated from the radio and called his (emperor’s) best
men to submit to the wishes of all and go to jail. There will be no
bloodshed, the radio said, only justice. His senators and judges, cabinet
members and ministers, his noblemen, began to leave their posts and walk
with grim confidence to turn themselves in (p: 42).

43
The junta officially promised that the high rank officials will be legally treated. The very
important reason that the military raised as a motion for opposition is that the emperor and his
officials were living luxuriously while the poor farmers were suffering and dying. Logically, any
force that is inspired by injustice is expected to tackle it and bring justice. Thus, if death of any
kind had inspired the revolution, the military junta would have not been engaged in killing the
officials. But this logic did not work; what happened is stated as follows:

The driver tapped his radio. “You didn’t hear?” he asked, turning around,
then back to the road again. “The Derg killed sixty officials last night. Just
shot them like criminals.” He wiped his cheeks. “Even the prince and the
prime ministers. Ex-prime ministers. No trials.” He ran a hand over his
face but the stunned expression in his eyes remained. He couldn’t stop
shaking his head. “They killed General Amman in his home. They killed
them…” his voice trailed into silence (p: 93).
The situation in such an intermediate period has a very critical significance as it helps political
philosophers to come up with their own theories. This is a period of serious hardship in which
everyone is in danger of others’ acts. Life in this situation is different from life in the state of
nature because of the presence of some organized forces whose basement is neither divine right
nor social contract. In this condition, everyone is not equal since some are in groups while others
are alone. Because of this, there is no reciprocity of power and jurisdiction. Members of the
strongest group cannot also claim a divine right because the success is the cumulative effect of
everyone’s effort.

The worst thing is that the junta did not have comprehensively pre-designed laws since it did not
officially come to social contract before having power. This put everyone outside of the strongest
group in danger. It is because of this that the sixty officials and countless civilians were
massacred; they lost their basic liberty of living. As every other citizen, they could have wanted
to live, but they were denied it; they could have wanted their cases to be legally seen, but it did
not happen. All the massacre happened since the junta had no clear political position: it did not
recognize people’s natural freedom and equality (state of nature); it was not bounded by will of
God (divine right); neither did it get people’s contractual consent (social contract). Thus, it can
be easily expected that any government of this kind (out of the three) causes similar destructions,
and even worse.

44
The paradox is that the ideology of the government is Marxism Leninism—an ideology with a
central aim of avoiding exploitation. But the reality is that there is no exploitation worse than
losing one’s life in vain. With regard to this, Solomon (a character) says, “They’ve jailed us,
they’re killing us, they’ve started dumping us like trash on the road, and now they’ve really done
it, they’re stealing our ideology. Can you imagine? Those bastards! Creating socialist advisory
boards with some of my former friends, trying to create a joint forum” (p: 201). It is obvious that
economic exploitation takes the lives of many people, but it is not as inescapable as “Red
Terror”.

Though there are many instances of insecurity, the most awful ones are revealed through the
tragic lives of Dr. Hailu, the girl, and Berhane. These three are the most mistreated characters in
the novel. Dr. Hailu is a very diligent and innocent physician who works relentlessly for the
benefit of his patients. When crisis comes, he always prays counting his prayer beads. But his
liberty was endangered in a very unjust manner. He was forced by soldiers to treat a girl after
they had half-killed her. The soldiers did every inhumane treatment of torture, burning, and rape
on the girl. But, since they want to get information from her, they did not want her to die for their
own advantage. The suffering and humiliation that she would have faced with if she had survived
is stated as follows:

This girl was too weak to survive another round of interrogation. Even if
she lived, she’d bear the scars for life. There would always be deep gashes
on her thighs, her feet would never wear delicate heels. She would always
walk with limp. She had been raped, violently. She’d be so ashamed, she’d
never marry. Her days would be spent trying to prepare for the nightmares
that would awaken when the sun died (p: 154).
It was such a victimized girl that Hailu was forced to treat her though she was almost dead: to
save her life not for the good of her, but so that they can dig information from her underside.
Normally, it is obvious that any patient has three possibilities: healing, remaining bedridden, and
dying. What happened to the girl is not different from these accepted possibilities; she died of the
soldiers’ torture and rape. After her death, it was Hailu who was incriminated, jailed, and
tortured near to death. This is described in the following way:

45
 Hailu’s ankles were shoved together and cuffed. His hands and legs were
attached to a heavy silver chain. His bones felt as if they’d slide out of
socket trying to drag the chain around. He wanted to sit down on the bed
but the officer kicked him in the back and sent him tumbling to the floor.
His teeth smashed together as loudly as the handcuffs that hit the concrete
(p: 220).

According to Berlin, the negative freedom of the two innocent citizens was endangered. This
happened since their natural freedom was not recognized. In such a condition, no one had the
right to take cases to a court for there was no law after all; this was a transitional period, a period
of chaos. What is worst is that the situation of the intermediate period continued as a typical
characteristic of the entire seasons of the regime. This can be understood from the fate of Sofia’s
family.

Sofia is one of the most miserable characters in the novel. Her husband, Daniel, was killed by the
junta. This gave her hard time because of the persistent grief and economic crisis she was made
to face. At the top of this, her small and innocent kid became a victim of the warm bullets of the
day. At that very early age, Sofia’s two sons, Robel and Berhane, were forced to support
themselves as a result of their father’s death. Not only this, but Berhane had also inherited his
father’s fate and found himself in the blood-wet hands of the junta. He was arrested for not
giving information about a suspect that the kid could not know the whereabouts of him. Though
Berhane was horrifyingly threatened by the military officials, he could not say anything about
the issue that he did not know. Then, they treated him as it is described here below:

The tall man turned around, angry. “He knows. They always know.” He
swept the needle through the air and Berhane’s eyes followed every
motion, ready to scream when it touched him. “They think they can use
kids now and we won’t dare question them? He’s not a kid”—the man
pointed at him. “This is our newest enemy.” Berhane was so intent on
watching the short man run to a corner and kneel that he lost track of the
needle. It stabbed his thigh before he had a chance to scream. It went
through his leg, its coolness warmed by his blood, and he thought he heard
the tip hit against the metal chair before the man ripped it back out, flesh
sliding from the end. Berhane gaped at the gashing wound in his thigh
and realized the voice wailing into his ears, slamming through his hot,
pounding head, was his own. The needle come down again. Berhane saw
it arc slowly through the air, a brilliant ribbon of red floating through
silence and nothingness (p: 232).

46
This child did nothing wrong except not telling what he did not know, which normally should
have been appreciated. Instead, he was badly tortured, and was finally killed. At the top of this,
his miserable mother could not get the right to bury her dead son; she along with her neighbors
took him to a forest, and dumped him there. It was not only the right to live but also the right to
be buried in a common way that the people of the day were denied. In principle, the Marxist-
Leninist ideology was taken as the best remedy to safeguard citizens from exploitation, but the
people were awfully insecure let alone to be privileged. The destination of this ideology is to
create a communal society whose equality and liberty is secured like life in the state of nature;
however, the reality is that citizens were treated from the outset in a life threatening way. This is
the very push factor for the three heros, Anbessa, Mekonnen, and Solomon to begin the new
struggle without ideological change. Because of the increasingly emerging opponents, it was the
junta who reshaped the Marxist-Leninist ideology to a fascist nationalism through the motto of
“Ethiopia First!”. The aim of the new struggle was not only to ensure the liberty of the people
but also to bring about justice.

4.2.6 Derg’s Fascist Nationalism

When the new struggle was started, the wave of the protest forced the junta to adjust itself to a
fascist nationalist mode of reaction so as to get rid of the emerging threats. On their part, the
youngsters were engaged in attacking the junta through a guerrilla fighting. This is a period in
which the two opponent groups dropped their former Marxist-Leninist ideology and concentrated
on how to eliminate each other. During their confrontation, none of them was thinking about
what they were planning to do in the future. It was simply a fascist and anti-fascist reaction and
counterattack that dominated the time, a horrifying season to the civilians. The following
discourse from Gudu (the main “important” person of the junta) best describes the situation:
“The Red Terror!” the still-breathing Gudu declared in the revolution
Square. “The Red Terror will break the backs of these enemies of the
state! They have killed one more of our brave! They have tried to kill me
once again! And again they have failed!” he pounded on a podium in front
of a new crowd of terrorized and shaking spectators and held up a bottle
filled with water the color of blood. “We have recently eliminated the
traitor Chairman Teferi Bante for his treasonous acts against the state,” he
declared ignoring the surprising gasp from the crowd. “From Nakfa to
Assab, we will destroy every Eritrean rebel! All those who want to stop
Ethiopia’s progress will be eliminated. We will not stop until the gutters
47
 flow with the blood of all our enemies! We will fight bourgeois White
Terror with Red Terror! Until Ethiopian soil is soaked with their bones
and flesh and cries, we will not stop! Death to our enemies! Death!” he
raised the bottle higher and sent it crashing to the ground. Red-tinged
shards of glass splintered and glistened in the sun. A thousand mothers
and fathers sank to their knees and prayed. Youngmen and women braced
themselves for a new onslaught of violence. And everywhere, everyone
searched the heavens for signs that angels reigned, that they would listen
and heed their calls for help (p: 290).
It was this position of fascist nationalism that turned the Marxist-Leninist ideology of Ethiopia
upside down. Hobbes’s fear of “war of each against all” showed its symptom; everyone in the
nation including those in power were terrorized; everyone stopped thinking about bourgeois
exploitation since they were engaged in a life and death issue. It became a proof that the Marxist-
Leninist ideology could not bring the hypothetical world of the state of nature, a world where
everyone could live freely and equally without any kind of exploitation. Instead, it proliferated so
many enemies that awfully frightened the military government. The three heros, namely
Anbessa, Solomon and Mokennen killed many soldiers, and this resulted in the implementation
of Gudu’s discourse; a great mass of people were massacred because of these three freedom
fighters as it is stated below:

As bodies piled on top of each other in the city streets and public squares,
as families stumbled over familiar corpses draped with signs that
announced “Red Terror” in cooling blood, as mass graves grew, stories of
Anbessa’s furious gun battles with the Derg’s rattled soldiers, always
fought with Mekonnen and Solomon at his side, rippled through homes.
The governments search for the three men intensified. Week after week,
special forces were sent into the highlands, ordered to burrow into caves
and huts, destroyed fields and farms, raze villages and climb to the bottom
of watery wells. And still they found nothing. It was as if, the people
breathed, it was as if angels had made them invisible. Nightly, prayers
were sent up for Anbessa destroyer of roadblocks, Mekonnen killer of
soldiers, and Solomon the wise. The Holy Trinity, some declared to say,
unafraid to blaspheme a deity who had long abandoned them (p: 290-291).
The people called these three fighters “The Holy Trinity” because of the fact that they attacked
the common enemy. However, nothing was told about what ideology is better for the equality
and security of the people; nothing is said about equality, freedom, democracy and justice. It is
only searching a way to escape from the crisis of “state of nature”. Laws were not referred;

48
courts were not open; only guns were the “just” tools; then death was the result. It was this threat
that John Locke extracted from Hobbes’s solution to the situation in the state of nature. Hobbes
claimed that a sovereign authority is the best solution to the peace and security of human beings.
But Locke challenged this conception by arguing that such a sovereign authority finally leads to
another instability which could not be different from the state of nature. This was what happened
in Ethiopia. Locke then recommended that people should come to a social contract and elect their
leaders through a representative democracy. But the young fighters portrayed in the text did not
have Locke’s conception of representative democracy; their mission was only to eliminate the
fascist force that wanted to eliminate them.

In general, Maaza has extensively dealt with the ideologies that Ethiopia had experienced during
the Haile Selasie and Derg Regimes. The major ideologies swayed from Feudo-Capitalism to
Marxism-Leninism, and then to Fascist Nationalism. This novel, therefore, is written in line with
the Ethiopian history of the last two regimes before the current government. Though the book is
the most recent of all the other texts selected for this study, it did not explicitly say anything
about the current political situation of the country, Ethiopia. But one can infer something in
association with those three fighters who brought the junta to its end. For instance, Mekonnen
killer of soldiers (later name for Dawit) was a revolutionary activist struggling against Emperor
Haile Selasie since his college time. Solomon as character and revolutionary activist appeared
late in the novel, but he himself says that he was a Marxist-Leninist. When we join these textual
evidences with Gudu’s discourse, there is a combined force of the Ethiopians and Eritreans that
frustrated the junta terribly. Still, she is not engaged in the Post-Derg Ethiopian politics.

4.3 Analysis of Ideological Plane in Give Me a Dog’s Life Any Day:

African Absurdities II
4.3.1 Summary of the Text

Hama Tuma’s book, Give Me a Dog’s Life Any Day, is a collection of more than forty essays
which deal with political satire of the existing system of governance all over the world. These
essays try to show the various types of injustice that the world is suffering from. As per Hama’s
view, we can see that his writing reveals four important issues: hypocrisy, double standard,
collateral damage, and dictatorship.
49
Primarily, what the Westerners preach the other world is what they themselves do not do when a
critical time comes to them. This is to mean that they say that the world has to be led by
democratic governments when they themselves violate what they call principles of democracy.
They recommend that human rights should be respected, but they forget what human rights do
mean when they are practically interpreted. In general, what they believe in principle and what
they do in practice are quite different.

Secondly, the essays mainly show the evil of the western calculation of the double standard in
the political realm of the world. For instance, what is legally punishable if it happens to the
Westerners is a simple and right thing if it happens to the Non-westerners. Not only this, the
important things that Westerners badly need are also taken as unfit to the Non-westerns,
especially to the Africans. According to Hama, there are two entities of human beings: an entity
of the West and an entity of the Non-West. He asserts that the West is always advantaged at the
expense of the Non-west. The democracy in the west is also questioned for its applications for all
human beings.

Thirdly, one effect of the double standard is the collateral damage that the Westerners commit
upon the citizens of the other continents. As Hama has frequently stated it, the Americans during
the presidency of Bush killed a number of innocent citizens of Iraq. Had it been the case of an
African nation, or any nation out of the West, this act would have been judged as genocide. But,
since the killing of these citizens was by America, it was not considered as a crime legally, and
as an evil morally. However, Hama Tuma does not appreciate the African presidents, except
Mugabe, for not defending themselves whatever pressure is imposed upon them. As a Pan-
Africanist, he blames the West as the very typical opponents of the African continent.

Fourthly, he strongly blames the African presidents as internally brute, but externally
submissive. These essays address their criticism to every leader who, as per Hama, is found to be
guilty regardless of her/his whereabouts. He believes that the western leaders influence the
African presidents; and the African presidents also brutally treat their fellow citizens.

Generally, the book shows the cynical nature of all those who are in power; no one among
authorities has been mentioned for good deeds except Mugabe’s protest against the western
powers.
50
 4.3.2 Hama’s Anarchist Ideology
The title, Give Me a Dog’s Any Day, indicates the ideology of the writer from a very broad
spectrum. One can also have two entities from it: a dog and a non-dog. The term “dog” does not
refer to any dog, rather the privileged ones; the “non-dog” does not also refer to all other things
out of dogs, rather to all vulnerable people of the African continent. This leads us to the
dichotomy of the West and Non-west. However, Hama Tuma did not want to make a people to
people comparison because of the fact that he found the people of the West and Non-West are
incomparable. Thus, he preferred to use the man—dog dichotomy. As to him, a dog in the West
is not only more privileged than a dog in the Non-west, but also privileged than the African
people. This is stated by the writer himself in the following way:
Let us admit it—the dogs in the west live better than millions of Africans.
I have dealt with this in the article bearing the same title as the book.
There is no jealousy involved here nor is there a real yearning to live a
dog’s life. To begin with, the dog in Africa has as bad a deal as the
common African. The dogs in the west are born on lucky days and as we
know luck is what most of us Africans do not have in abundance (how
many Africans have won the lottery in the western world?) we cannot
even get into the western countries let alone be pampered like the dogs
and other pets. Give me a dog’s life is thus a denunciation of the double
standards, the eternal bad card handed out to Africans and other people
referred to as “under developed”(Hama, 2004: 3-4).

The above discourse literally seems to convey the writer’s blame to the westerners by siding to
his African folk, but Africans are also blamed on their part—“…the dog in Africa has as bad a
deal as the common African,” indicates that the common Africans are oppressed by the
uncommon ones. This critical political commentary leads us to the ideology of the author.

Hama’s ideology is hard to fix if his views are not treated in a relativity mode. Specific to his
book on African absurdities II, Hama’s views have both Pan-African and international
significance. At a broad international spectrum, he writes in favor of the Non-west; but at a
continental level, he is more concernedly engaged in the African affairs. He still views Africa
from two perspectives: 1) the people as innocent and victim of both internal and external evils,
and 2) the presidents as dictators and blood suckers internally, and submissive toys of the
Western imperialists externally. The only African president praised by Hama is Robert Mugabe
of Zimbabwe. He admires Mugabe not because of his good things to his people, but because of

51
his courage in openly opposing the Western imperial powers. But when it comes to the
president’s relation with his people, it is no less than the Westerns’ treatment to the Non-
westerns. He says, “The one and only African leader closely learning from the Americans is
none other than Mugabe. No loud speech on the free press: anyone who criticizes the president
will be punished” (p: 97). In short, Hama Tuma is a living author, who has so far lacked a
government that can satisfy him.

Therefore, Hama’s ideology is a liberal type of anarchism. In this book, he said nothing good
about governments in general. He rather brought to light all sorts of evils about them and about
what they do. He himself says, “Some people have labeled me an “afro pessimist” because they
took my first Absurdities book as a proof that I have lost faith in the continent.” With regard to
anarchism, Robertson (2004: 15) provides two propositions: Society does not need a
government, and no government is legitimate without a real and detailed consent of all the
governed.

The first proposition fits to radical anarchists while the second is a proposition that best describes
the liberal anarchists. Robertson adds that the common characteristic of all anarchists is that they
do not match with the existing structure and practices of their contemporary governments. This
statement and the second proposition of anarchism also best describe Hama’s ideology in Give
Me a Dog’s Life Any Day. For him, all African presidents are dictators; all governments in the
West are unjust imperialists; and the major international organizations are advanced tools of
oppression solely in the hands of the imperialists. Concerning with the African case, the writer in
his article “Dictators for Sale” says:

We are poor but we have a surplus of dictators. We can sell to the Hague
Court not one but many dictators who can boldly claim to have had a
genocide or two under their belts. This means that our suffering will bring
us our deliverance, we may have been devastated by the dictators but we
can still sell them off and get a huge amount of money in the process (p:
22).
According to Hama, there is no another continent that is more dwelt with dictators than Africa.
He does not expect anything meaningful to the people from the leaders. They are perceived as
children who need leaders let alone to lead their people. He said, “Take elections and the
presence of foreign monitors (Africans are children who need monitors of course)—many
52
presidents have kept away such monitors and staged a farce of an election (rigged and false)
without the west ostracizing them…” (p: 20). They are also stated as selfish, suspicious, rhetoric
(not pragmatic) and unfriendly creatures of the continent. The discourse below conveys the
author’s actual voice:

Of course, there is little that is new, no partnership and scant development

to talk about and even envisage. Yet, the pompous name given to the futile
exercise captivates the African presidents who do not need that much
coaxing to go clubbing in the City of Light. African presidents love empty
talk and sleeping in luxurious hotels with the white security guards
hovering nearby pretending to be worried about their safety. They are
dictators whose demise would be God-sent for their peoples but who are
being protected as if they were valuable items or as more endangered than
the red fox in Ethiopia (p: 26-27).
Because of his being a liberal anarchist, the author has not so far claimed that governments are
unwanted. Instead, he blames that there is no any democratic government in the entire continent.
According to Robertson’s second proposition, Hama could not match with the existing political
arena of his time. The plane of this ideological position of the writer leads us to the theory of
social contract. Except Hobbes, the other social contract thinkers propose democracy as the way
out from the chaos of state of nature, and the oppression and exploitation of the absolute
monarchy. In Hama’s view of the African case, all what he said could happen as a result of the
infancy of democracy. It is only in democratic governments that people could come to a contract
to ascend their leaders to power, and to descend them from it if they cannot go in line with the
contract. Had it been by a social contract that the African leaders have got their power, they
would not have worried about their safety; neither would have been reluctant to step down when
they were/are asked to. Instead of having a peaceful contractual system, Hama says, the African
leaders are engaged in an empty business. He satirically describes them in this way:

Some people think the special capacity of African leaders is their ability to
slaughter their own citizens and to rob their countries blind but this is a
wrong conclusion. African leaders are world class experts at the art of
doing nothing and yet convincing everyone that they are the busiest
political bees in existence. To do nothing and project the image of a
workaholic or overactive person is not an easy task at all (p: 58).
This satirical commentary goes from bad to worst. The author ironically indicates that the
African leaders slaughter their citizens; the term “wrong” is a verbal irony to mean right. To
53
understand this, one has to read his article, “The Art of Doing Nothing,” which asserts that the
leaders do not do anything good to their people but all the evils to their misery. He justifies that
this is so because the leaders have “masters” at doing nothing—nothing good. Now, the main
issue is to see the political philosophy behind this criticism. The primary reason why the writer
raised this issue in his essays is because that the presidents took power without any form of
social contract; it is only the rulers that decided to rule; the ruled were not able to decide who
should rule them and how. The title, “un-elected presidents” is now and then fixed as a prefix to
the names of the African presidents. All, with no exception, are entitled this dishonorable
adjective. The history of ascending to power of the African leaders is summarized as the history
of coup after coup and revolution after revolution. What he raises is that most of those who came
to power in this way claim that they are democrats of this or that type. But the question is how a
government that did not come to power without social contract could be democrat. This leads us
to the concepts of procedural and substantial democracy. As per procedural democracy, what is
important is the way we perform things. In this case, any victorious political group, to be a
democrat, has to submit its power to people, and people have to give their contract to someone
that they trust could exercise power fairly. This procedure of a social contract does not, however,
guarantee the presence of democracy. A contract is made for a “General Good” – a substantial
democracy. This indicates that a contract focuses both on the process and the end. Thus, the
political philosophy behind Hama’s anarchic ideology portrays that the leaders are not able to go
as per the interest of the general public, both procedurally and substantially.

Leaving these African cases to later discussions, it is also quite essential to survey the author’s
views on international politics so as to justify his ideology’s being a liberal anarchism. The
primary objective of this book is to show the unjust and inhumane treatments that the West has
been experiencing upon the Non-west. However, Hama has not left any of them, West and No-
west, blameless. To a higher degree, the Western governments are blamed as the root causes of
all miseries of the world, particularly Africa. Thus, he calls the West as brute imperialists, and
the relation between the West and the Non-west is also stated as:

The death of hypocrisy can be therapeutic and all of us, the unwashed
millions living under old fashioned states, can finally realize that human
rights and laws and smooth handling are for the west and not for us. What
we shall get is what we have been getting up to now—force, preemptive
54
 attack, double standards, deceptions and whatever is necessary for the
“new imperialism” to achieve its objectives (p: 8).

As a Non-west, specifically as an African, Hama is a very conscious writer who exactly graded
his and his kinsmen’s status in the international political scenario. He is not also restricted only
to the “West and Africa” dichotomy, rather included the other vulnerable parts of the globe. Not
only this, but a dozen of international organizations in which the Non-west claim to be members
are also found to be instruments of the Western powers. This also leads one to raise questions on
why and how these international organizations were founded.

Basically, an organization comes to existence with certain rules which could guide the overall
activities of the members. According to social contract theory, these rules or laws at a higher
level are expected to be the results of the common consensus of those which are under the
contract. All the members should also be equally seen in front of the laws they made. But the
case with the international organizations of this day is not compatible with the theory of social
contract. All members are not equally represented in the organization which they call “ours”,
instead, the reality is that the organization is solely of the powerful. Hama states this in the
following way:

To come back to the issue, Africa’s increasing pretension as a world class

power like any other worthy continent was recently given a push by the
fact that at least two African countries have joined the league of the super
five in the UN Security Council. Nigeria and Ethiopia have now been
cited as the two countries along with China and Russia (and India) that
will have the biggest number of AIDS victims by the year 2010 and
thereby posing a dangerous and serious threat to world security. All we
know, any country that poses a danger to world security is a country that
counts. Small countries have projected big threats and counted for
something. Take Libya in the past. Take tiny Israel. Consider small
Rwanda posing a threat to the whole Great Lakes region by invading the
bigger Congo / Zaire. Ethiopia and Nigeria are poor but big countries with
huge population numbers. By being AIDS super power countries just like
China and Russia (who own weapons of mass destruction and sit in the
UN Security Council), they have elevated the status of the whole continent
to the world power level. AIDS kills indiscriminately and in great numbers
and what is feared most in this world but something or someone who kills
and destroys en masse? (P: 86-87).

55
Hama’s satirical discourse clearly shows that the weak countries of Africa do not have voice in
the United Nations. They are toothless members whose will and influence are unheard. On the
contrary, few countries are at the top of the organization because of no other reasons than their
potential of being threat to the world security. In this “civilized world” where democracy is
preached from every corner, a sound membership is gained not because of the contract, rather
because of terrorizing the globe. In a normal condition, every member of any organization is
expected to act according to the laws they made; and if one fails respecting the law, what follows
is a punishment. But in the case of the United Nations, the grand organization for that matter,
those who are threats and still members are entitled as super powers. This is more than a
reward—a big international recognition. The contradiction is that the western super powers claim
that they have leaders elected on the basis of social contract, particularly Locke’s representative
democracy. But, why this does not work internationally is, according to Hama, because of double
standard. Double standard is the central idea of this political satire. Because of this, it is
emphasized and boldly treated as a focal point to see other related issues.

4.3.3 Double Standard

As a central theme of the book, double standard is frequently discussed here and there. What we
hear is the voice of a person who complains for being treated as inferior to a dog. This is an
accusation to those who consider their own species as lower than non-human species, dogs.
When this is seen from the theory of the state of nature, the idea all men are born equal and free
is no more functioning in the West since there are Africans who are not equal not only to
Western men but also to the dogs in the West. The black are not as free as dogs; “while Europe
tightens its borders and tries by all possible means to keep the African out and away, dogs are
given official certifications and pet passports and can now freely travel to any European country”
(p: 70). He also asserts that black is a bad color only when it refers to the colored people of
Africa, but not otherwise—“black is a good color if you are a dog” (p: 71). Comprehensively,
double standard in this text is manifested in the form of unfairness, brutality, selfishness, and
hypocrisy of the West. These things are separately treated so as to look into the issue of double
standard in detail.

56
 4.3.3.1 Unfairness

This sub-section deals with the practice of justice as reflected in the target text. John Rawls as
cited in Goodin and Pettit (1997: 187) asserts, “The fundamental idea in the concept of justice is
fairness.” According to Rousseau, a perfect fairness was practiced only in the state of nature
because people by then were innocent and good. However, as soon as privatization visited that
just world of state of nature, all sorts of evils began not only visiting but also controlling human
beings. Even on these days, the western world claims that man has a dozen of rights that the
contract he made with others has granted him. After all, Locke’s ideas of the right for life, liberty
and happiness are the common denominators in the constitutions of their respective countries.
Even those who are stereotyped because of their belief that power is given by God also give the
appropriate credit for the ordinary people. For instance, Augustine believes that men among
themselves are equal and free, and adds that animals are inferior to men. But what Hama says
about the practices in the western world is quite the reverse:

The dogs, of France for example, are on the social ladder higher than the
African immigrant let alone the poor African in the continent. France has
48 million pets and spends more than three billion dollars on them per
year. This is equal or more to the national budget of many African
countries. Every year some more than 600,000 pets are sold and 960
million France Francs earned as a result. You buy a Sudanese slave boy’s
freedom for a meager 100 dollars. Millions of dollars are spent every year
on what is called the Dog’s Fashion Show Event (p: 70).
By now we have to admit that we are in a world of privatization. Thus, everyone strives to own
something on which her/his life depends. There are, however, two fundamental issues as far as
privatization is concerned: acquisition and consumption. These remained points of philosophical
arguments among political philosophers. For Locke, acquisition of private property is possible
only by mixing natural objects with labour. Still consuming and accumulating beyond what one
needs is exploiting others. As per Rawls, distribution is important if it does not negatively affect
those who give to others. However, if the giver is affected because of her/his giving the amount
required, the right of property ownership is said to be violated. In this case, the French are using
their franc for something that the dog never rationally knows as a favor. Instead, had it come to
the hunger stricken people of the poor countries as an emergency fund, this favor would have
been well understood by the rational human kind. But for Rozick, once privatization became
57
legal, it is up to the owners to decide how to use their properties. If it pleases them, they can burn
their properties at any rate as far as the preconditions, just procedures of acquisition and transfer,
are fulfilled. This concept of fairness, however, centers on the win-win approach. Unlike
Rozick’s “Do what may” concept of privatization, others focus on human security without
forgetting the security of the dogs. Hama’s woes of unfairness are not restricted only to goods;
services are also, to ones disbelief, included as follows:

There are more NGOs and associations concerned for the fate of dogs than
are there to protect Africans. The old and faded cinema actress Brigitte
Bardot weeps for dogs while voting for the fascist Le Pen who hates
Africans. Hundreds and thousands of Africans lack treatment for diabetes
while dogs are being effectively treated for what is known as pet diabetes.
How many of us knew that dogs also get acupuncture treatments? There
are psychiatrists who treat dogs, vets at every corner, dog motels for those
left behind during their owner’s vacation trips and, as we all know, many
Africans are employed to walk the dogs every day. Expensive nail polish
and cologne, tooth-paste and health pills are available for dogs. There are
more clinics for dogs in some western capitals than there are for human
beings in many African towns (p: 70).
It is undeniable fact that this age is an age of globalization in which people all over the world are
highly interacting in all spheres of life. Because of this fact, it is becoming very difficult for
countries or for people to live independently. This is to mean that one does have a role both in
the luxury and misery of others. The basic argument is that the West has reached this level of
development using precious resources of the Non-west; therefore, it is not fair to let dogs live a
luxurious life at the expense of thousands of others who live miserably. Hama says that there is
no jealousy with the dogs, rather opposition against those who practice imperialist exploitation.
In a world where trade imbalance is awfully practiced, no one could have the confidence to claim
that there is a just procedure of acquiring wealth. Double standard, because of unfair treatment,
deteriorates the concept that people are naturally equal. Where there is unfairness, equality is
always endangered. The author has put this as follows:

Double standard? It refers to that measure, which is bent, to forked tongue,

to two criteria and considerations, to plain and simple unfairness. It is that
which divided the world into theirs and ours and inevitably condemns ours
to be bleak, miserable, and unworthy and trivial. As things and lives are
put on the scale ours weigh less, are of no importance, of little
significance. A white nun who died in the Congo was worth more than
58
 hundreds of the locals who died in the same period in the same crisis back
in the sixties. Not much has changed (p: 82).

This discourse emptifies the basic contents of the western constitutions, the charters of the giant
international organizations, and the themes of all sorts of conventions. The starting point for all
these is the condition of man in the state of nature—unrestricted equality and freedom. However,
the founding countries are frequently involved in practices that violate these basic conceptions.
The important contradiction is that nature has made human beings equal, but human beings are
always creating double standard not to be equal and thereby opposing nature. The west better
than others know the fact that “men are equal”, and advocate the norm that “men should be
equal,” but the problem is that all these things work only for the “we” not for the “they”. They
form unequal pairs, one privileged and the other oppressed. This leads us to the next sub-section.

4.3.3.2 Brutality and Selfishness

The other manifestation of double standard is brutality. According to the divine rights theory,
man is commanded not to do bad things that he does not want others to do them up on himself.
Moreover, Rousseau asserts that man in the state of nature was honest and innocent. But the
reality is that man in the recent condition of social contract is found brutal. Hama satirically calls
them (west) humanitarians, who give priority to dogs and fix inferiority to Africans. He is
puzzled by the countless humanitarian organizations of the west whose founders are those who
do not recognize black humans, rather black dogs. The very thing that aches the author is the
frequent collateral damage that the super powers commit up on the innocent citizens of their
opponents. If this is the reality, the status and mission of the humanitarian organizations are
questions only the actual practices can answer them. The other thing which puzzled the author is
that the key countries which are the members of the Security Council are found to be war liking.
The case of Iraq and America is what Hama consistently recited in his discourse. The condition
looks like the Darwinian principle of “the fittest survives”. What makes today’s condition
different from that of the state of nature is that today’s equality and freedom are paper value, not
eternal; the war is not the war of each against all, rather the war of the powerful against the
threats of its national interest. There is also a concentration of power and jurisdiction without
reciprocity. The following extracts will show how this brutality is portrayed in the text:

Invading a country to control its wealth is not at all a new thing. The
allegation that America and Britain invaded Iraq for its oil is actually
something that ought not be denied. Why not rob the country you invade?
What was the meaning and purpose of colonialism anyway? What did
Belgium do to Congo except rob it blind and murder millions? What did
Blair’s ancestors do in India, China, Africa, and what is Britain doing now
in Kenya, Sierra Leone, etc…? What was and is America’s interest in
supporting Apartheid? In having Lumumba assassinated and in backing
Mobutu? What is America doing in Equatorial Guinea that recently
discovered a large deposit of oil? And France in its backyard it calls
59
 Francophone Africa? The absurdity of the claim of humanitarian interest
in launching an invasion has now been exploded (p: 168).

The brutality of the west, according to this discourse, ranges from robbing to killing. There are a
lot of inhumane acts that follow invading others’ territories. In any of the theories of political
philosophy, no one has the right to take what others claim as theirs. According to Locke, a land
of “no man” can be occupied since there is no one who legitimately could claim ownership. But
a territory for which citizens made a relentless effort and scarification for its sovereignty should
not be invaded by any force. This is because the citizens have mixed their effort to add value to
it. The very reason why they practice brutality is because of their selfishness; they need
something, but they know that it cannot be accessible without killing. They need oil, but it is
hard to snatch without killing. The very root cause of brutality, therefore, is selfishness. The
super powers do not want the hegemony to slip from their hands, so they have to kick off the
emerging powers that could threaten the status quo. According to Hobbes, man is selfish and
wants to dominate others before they dominate him. This is also happening in an organized
manner at international level.

These all are, therefore, the results of double standard. The western countries do have very
advanced and comprehensive constitutions which are applied only to themselves. When the case
comes to the non-west, the principles of their constitutions are interpreted upside down. For
instance, they claim that men are naturally equal, but the question is who are those entitled as
“men”? Is the Africans’ being men the same as the westerns’ being men? Hama put this as
follows:

To be fair, I must mention that one million Ethiopians who died of

manmade famine in 1984 got a “We Are the World” hit song. Compared
to the victims in New York and Washington—some 3,000 maximum-who
got many songs and solitary gestures almost overnight, the poor Horn of
Africa victims were shortchanged. For those inclined to see everything
mathematically, some 333 Ethiopians had the value of one American.
Given the difference in standard of life, one can also say the whole thing is
not bad at all. (One American defense department official had said that a
ratio of eighty thousand Rwandese dead to one American dead could have
justified American military intervention in Rwanda) (P: 46).
Hama’s calculation shows the discrepancy in the value of human beings between Africans and
Americans. Human value is measured by the whereabouts and the material circumstances that
60
surround her/him. Naturally, a man in America came to this world in the same way a man in
Africa did. But the artificial difference appeared as a result of man’s membership to certain
predecessors. Hama raises the fate of dogs that are born in Africa in comparison with the fate of
dogs that are born in America. He says, “There is no doubt dogs live better than most Africans.
Of course I am referring to the intelligent or fortunate ones born in the west as dogs in Africa
fare no better than the human inhabitants. This goes to prove once again that where you are born
does matter and it is not only a question of color genes” (P: 71).

Therefore, if one’s birth place is in America, it gives him/her more value than any African. This,
however, is not spoken out but done practically. There is no such a law that gives the west that
much privilege and the African that much disadvantage. Smart laws are written; principles are
many; “humanitarian” groups are countless, and so is the evil done on the non-west. As a matter
of fact, the laws in the west had been written before they gave recognition to the blacks; hence,
blacks were not considered as active members of the international community. But these days, all
men are equal in principle, but some are exceptionally privileged in practice. Thus, the root cause
of the problem is no other than hypocrisy.

4.3.3.3 Hypocrisy
Hypocrisy is also one among the basic manifestations of double standard. The very reason why
people are engaged in activities which could erode others’ trust upon them is because of their
hypocritical nature. Many higher level principles of politics, morality and humanity emerge from
the west, but a dozen of evil practices which contradict with the principles are also from there. It
is only in the state of nature that man can live life in consistency; there is an immediacy of
practice and principle. Since there is no collective and structured principle, one’s acts are not
hindered by externality—they do what they believe could help achieve their goals. This is
because that there is no hypocrisy in the state of nature. On the contrary, life both in the divine
right of kings and the social contract is highly influenced by externality. This happens as the
result of disharmony between the imposed laws and the egoistic desires. Nothing different is
happening in today’s world. Hama’s book is, therefore, about this dual approach of the western
powers to the same nature of human beings. The reality that human practices and desires are
similar is shadowed by the western hypocrisy, which led to double standard. The author put this
as:
61
 The west had always derided African politics, a complicated, complex and
dangerous thing, because corruption has been its main leitmotif. African
leaders had been accused and condemned of dipping into the national
treasury, of stealing, of being corrupt to their core and more. In Africa,
many political pundits claimed, an honest politician is as rare a sight as a
Taliban in Las Vegas casino or an antelope in the Sahara. Take the French
political scene as it unfolded in the last presidential elections. The main
contenders to the highest posts of the nation, from Jacques Chirac to
Tiberi and to Balkany have all been accused of corruption and illegal
gains, yet, they have all been elected. At the same time while the thieves
and liars make it to the palace, the fighters for justice, the trade union
leaders, the men of the people are sent to jail as has happened to the
militant anti-globalist Jose Bove (p: 51-52).
When the reality is seen, the basic human nature is the same everywhere as far as no unique
species is in existence. However, people try to make a difference by modifying their nature in the
way they believe is good. But it is observed that the artificial guidelines are frequently violated
by the makers themselves. This happens because of hypocrisy. The west blame the Africans for
not acting democratically, but they themselves are found to be undemocratic. For instance,
Americans claim that they are at the tip of democratization; they blame Africans for human
rights violation; they provide funds for infrastructure; and they claim that it is their ‘duty by
willingness’ to maintain global peace and security. But Hama uncovers their hypocrisy in the
following way:

The war against Iraq is for sure a strange war. It is an invasion that calls
itself libration; it is a war that pretends to free the very people it is trying
to bombard to smithereens. It is a war win in which we see the invaders
destroy the infrastructure of the country and then pretend to distribute aid
to the very people they had put in difficulty in the first place. While in all
wars the truth becomes a victim, this one is a war that had, from the outset,
determined its policy to be the total murder of truth. This is why we now
have the embedded reporters—reporters who are “in bed” with the
invading army and project its propaganda as truth (p: 154).
Today, we are living in a world of social contract, which is full of imperfection. The very
problem, however, is that some are not tolerant to the imperfection of others by hiding their own
imperfection under their veils. This hypocritical realm of world politics serves as a benchmark to
the application of double standard. The very complication in the social contract is the issue of
scope. Normally, a contract works only to the parties who are involved in and signed to an

62
agreement; anybody out of the contract cannot be either benefited or disadvantaged by it.
However, the basic element in social contract theory is that human beings do have
commonalities in their nature and desire. It is this commonality that brings them together to form
a sovereign political entity. This is to mean that the principles do have a universal application.
But the issue of “contract” restricts the application only to those partners in a given agreement.
Thus, the very evil of today’s politics, according to Hama, is the restricted application of the
unrestricted principles. Maintaining peace, eradicating poverty, ensuring health and wellbeing,
enhancing democracy are few among the long list of principles which are universally positive,
yet the practices are awfully localized: somebody from the west refers to these principles only
when she/he is there, not in Africa. Thus, double standard is the fruit of hypocrisy.

4.3.4 Black against Black

Hama is not an author with ‘praise the one and blame the other’ kind of stand. According to this
text, he has not got any government (from blacks or whites) that could be praised for doing
something good. This sub-section, thus, shows the oppression that blacks were forced to face by
their own black species. The worst enemies of Africans are Africans themselves. The author
asserts that there had been stretched hands of blacks in the various evil deeds for which only the
whites are frequently blamed. During the dark eras of slave trade, colonialism and apartheid, few
blacks played their roles in facilitating the whites’ mission. Not only blacks in the African
continent, but also those who live in the western world have a negative attitude towards other
blacks. This is portrayed in the target text as provided here below:
It is a conclusion based on years of experiences. Black policemen and
women are harsh and ruthless towards their color kin. It all stems from
their rejection of their own identity. Here they are wearing the white
man’s uniform, equal to the White at least in dress, pretending that all are
equal and that they, black as they are, have the same power as the white
and out pops a black civilian (!), darker than a winter’s sky, loaded more
often than not with several suitcases and trying to access into their
paradise…the black policeman and woman constantly harass the hapless
black traveler. With stern faces, clipped style of talking, contemptuous
regards, the black police emerge as the guard dog par excellence of the
white citadels. We just hate blacks, says their posture, their assumed
disdain for the dark skinned victim (p: 112).
The violation of the truth that men are naturally equal and free is observed not only among the
whites, but the blacks are also involved in this act of distancing their own colored folk. Color
63
wise, the whites seem to have enough reason for the natural inequality of the black and white.
But the westernized blacks could not have such a claim. However, the fact is that color itself has
nothing to do with the concept of equality because we are all unique in size, height, beauty and
personality. So, these are manifestations of dissimilarities not inequality. The state of nature,
therefore, never considers such lower level differences as basic yardsticks in talking about the
concept of equality. This is to mean that both the white and black do not have philosophical
ground to treat the immigrants that way. Even in the divine right of kings, there is no such a
discrimination based on color. It is believed that all human beings, regardless of color, are
sinners. To maintain peace and order, God raises one among them, not an alien from a distant
place. Thus, color based inequality is a groundless partisan attitude of people; it is not a natural
bias.

According to Hama, the black policemen and women have lost their black identity because of
three factors: the brutality of the blacks in power, the relative “goodness” of the whites, and the
irresistible pressures of the whites. The black against black issue shows that there is no natural
hostile dichotomy between black and white. As western governments mistreat their African
counterparts, African governments also mistreat their own people. Hama says:

Off hand, I would have to say that, by this account, the first ones to be
arrested and prosecuted should be the African presidents. They are bad
jokes themselves and they have made it a habit to make inappropriate
jokes that are dangerous to the health of the people. They talk of
democracy, free elections, three meals per day, an end to hunger and even
make promises of peace. All this is a cruel and crude joke on the people,
totally inappropriate (p: 149).
Similar to the case with the west, unfairness, brutality, selfishness and hypocrisy are also features
of the African leaders. He calls all African leaders “unelected dictators” who have no mercy on
their own citizens, but already became play things of the western imperialists. Though Ethiopian,
he has not given special emphasis to his country; he equally treated it as a country led by
dictators without dealing with the details. He has mentioned the last two leaders of the country,
Mengistu and Meles, and gave them the common adjective of all African leaders—“dictators”.

To sum up, Hama is not only a Pan-Africanist, but also a pro-non-western internationalist.
Though he blames the west at international level, yet he has no mercy on the weakness of the
64
Non-west at a continental level. His ideology of liberal anarchism is built upon the non-existence
of even a single government that fits to the design of his unstated ideal state. He has brought to
light the evils of a dozen governments across the world, but he did not explicitly indicate the
nature of a government that he wants to see in the future.

4.4 Ideological Plane in Held at a Distance: My Discovery of Ethiopia

4.4.1 Summary of the Text
This book, written by Rebecca Haile, is partly a memoir of a lady about life in her childhood and
the impact of the then political situation on her family. It is also partly a travel account that the
author recorded in her visit to her motherland, Ethiopia. Concerning the political history of her
country, Rebecca makes her father a central figure around whom many events are stated. Her
father, Getachew Haile, was a very influential person among the intellectuals of the time. During
the reign of Emperor Haile Selasie, he received his degrees from abroad and served as an
instructor at Addis Ababa University in the Department of Ethiopian Languages and Literature.
He was also a confidante of the then patriarch of the Orthodox Church. Later, he became a
member of the Derg parliament representing the Shoa province. Thus, the memoir follows the
path that Getachew has gone through. Because of his religious background, he was not able to
accept the anti-religious notions of the socialist Derg. This resulted in a very tragic event in the
family—Getachew was shot near to death; then, he had to go to abroad for better treatment of his
spinal injury. This event is the very reason of being a diaspora for the eleven years young
Rebecca and the rest of her family.

The other parts of the text show the challenges that the family faced in their host country. The
continuity of the power of the military government forced the family to permanently settle in
America. The westernized Rebecca then started losing her identity and her Ethiopian way of life.
However, the effect of the Ethiopian politics was/is still in her veins. On the contrary, she was
also proud of her country’s independence and ancient civilization. These all helped her to search
her Ethiopian identity by physically coming to the country.

Part of the book, therefore, talks about Rebecca’s new discovery of her Ethiopian identity. She
asserts that she found Ethiopia beyond her expectation, except for few things by which she was
disappointed. In part two, The Historic North, she manifests a mixture of pleasure and
65
discomfort, especially because of the past and the present of Axum. She is very much proud of
the remains of the ancient civilization of the Axumite kingdom, but irritated by the regional
identity of the dwellers. For this reason, she characterizes Axum as a town of ancient civilization,
Christian kingdom, and ethnic regionalism. She is also extremely delighted by the unique
heritages of the monasteries of lake Tana and the rock hewn churches of Lalibela.

As important figure in this book as her father is engineer Tadesse, who is a very optimistic and
dynamic person. He handled his business dealings even on those days of high state intervention.
Basically, Rebecca’s father and her uncle are very different in their ideologies; the former is very
nationalist where as the later is a liberalist kind. Both these figures have influenced the author’s
ideology to a greater extent. Thus, her first ideology is nationalism, and it is treated in this next
sub-section.

4.4.2 Rebecca’s Nationalist Ideology

According to Leach (2002: 96), nationalism is an ideology which advocates the formation of
“…a community of people, bound together by some characteristics such as a common language,
religion, culture and ethnicity” (p: 96). Similarly, Rebecca’s nationalist ideology is also based on
uniformity of language, religion, and ethnicity. In fact, Rebecca is a westernized lady who, for
various reasons, was forced to give up her Ethiopian identity. For one thing, she was too kid to
maintain her former identity that she left behind. The other thing is that she did not have
exposure through which she could learn about her people in Ethiopia. Because of these two
reasons, she has been living a western life style, and at the same time started synthesizing her
second hand ideology about Ethiopia. Rebecca herself talks about this in the following way:
Since I was so young when we left, I had not yet developed a sophisticated
public Ethiopian identity, and to the extent I had a sense of self, it was
formed by my family and our life inside the private setting of our home.
The memory of our house, of our private space, became the foundation of
the Ethiopian identity I developed. As I grew older, I described Ethiopia as
a proud African nation that had resisted European colonization, a country
with an ancient history replete with literary and artistic achievement
(Rebecca, 2007: 27).
It is because of this reason that her basic points of nationalism appear parallel to her father’s
professional career. In fact, she has recorded many politico-historical events like the death of
thousands of peasants during the reign of Emperor Haile Selasie, the king’s effort to cover up the
66
famine instead of giving solutions, the down fall of the monarchy, the coming of the Derg, the
massacre of senior officials and nationalization. However, she has not brought a strong
ideological reaction against these events beyond a mere narration. Her ideologies target to the
situations of the current Ethiopian government (EPRDF). The basic notion of EPRDF’s federal
system ( “unity in diversity”) does not have room in Rebecca’s nationalist ideology. She claims
that this government is fragmenting the linguistic, religious, and ethnic oneness of the Ethiopian
people, and adds that this could endanger the aggregate unity of the nation at the end of the day.
Thus, these three basic components of Rebecca’s nationalist ideology are dealt in detail here
below.

4.4.2.1 Language
Rebecca’s concern about language has been growing since her childhood. While she was
learning in an American school, she was good at speaking English. But she had one question in
her mind; she wanted to know the reason why the foreigners were not learning Amharic while
she was learning their English. This basic but innocent question was of no answer during those
days. It is not also clearly stated in this text whether the motive to raise such a question is based
on the equality of languages, or a sensitive inclination towards one’s own language. To think that
the white should also learn Amharic at that early age of hers will lead us to the contradiction of
her own later view. After she had come to her country, she found that Ethiopia is not a country
that all her people speak only one language; this dismayed her very much since it was not as per
her expectation. Here comes the contradiction:
Beyond the loss of Eritrea, historic Axumite Ethiopia is also challenged by
the regionalism that pervades present day Axum. This regionalism
manifests itself most obviously through language. As in Eritrea, the
primary language of Axum and the rest of Tigre Province (killil) is
Tigrigna, not Amharic. I did not truly appreciate this fact or its
implications… (p: 85).
The above discourse does not seem to come out of a person who once wanted the whites to speak
Amharic. According to social contract theorists, language is a social phenomenon that cannot
exist without the voluntary interaction of the speakers. Lessnoff, (1990) states, “not only has man
been always by nature a social animal, the concept of contract is itself a social concept, which
presupposes social life among men. Pre-social men, if they could exist, could not even have the
concept of contract (or pact or covenant), and hence could not make one (they could not even
67
have a language)” (p: 2).This indicates that in a community where there is liberty, it is the result
of their agreement to speak this or that language. At one time, the people may agree to speak a
certain language; but if it pleases them to use another language any other time, still they can do it
as far as social contract is concerned.

As the title of the book indicates, the author has created her own hypothetical image of Ethiopia
before her coming to it. This speculation from a distance happened to mismatch with the reality
at home, and this dismayed her too much. She says, “Held at a distance by the intervening years,
by language and by culture, I felt farther and farther removed from our life in Ethiopia” (p: 16).
It is this identity longing of hers in the west that forced Rebecca to emotionally conceive
Ethiopia as a nation of unilingual type. As indicated in many of her discourses, she is in a
struggle to come out of her westernized self with which she is not satisfied. At the same time, she
is irritated by the strict nature of the Ethiopian tradition. It is when she is not stabilized from such
a dilemma that she tried to wipe out the other Ethiopian languages once and for all. She describes
her dilemma in the following way:

…I did not feel comfortable in traditional Ethiopian circles, which can be

conservative, hierarchical, and sexist. At the same time, I did not feel
entirely American: I never felt at ease with the fundamental lightheartedness
of my classmates or shared the sense of self-control and invincibility that
seemed to underlie it. I struck a balance in which I displayed an American
face to the world while I returned a private identification with Ethiopia that
I kept mostly to myself (p: 16).
It is this identity reconstruction from afar that resulted in a strong national feeling that
emotionally strives to compromise the existence of a dozen of Ethiopian languages. As per
political thinkers, there is an individualist world where communication is not a priority since one
does have the right to do things without consulting others. However, it is disastrous to live in a
world where there is no communication. When we come to the divine right of kings, God did not
impose people to use this language and not to use that language. It is, therefore, the social
contract that deals with how to use languages. A contract after all is the result of communication;
people agree if and only if they communicate. At the top of all, there is a language that helps
people to come to a common consensus. To maintain this advantage, people make a contract to

68
use a certain language to the desired end. But if they get another language that best
communicates them, there is no reason that they cannot come to a new contract.

With regard to the text, Rebecca is disappointed because of the very reason that she heard people
speaking in a language that she could not hear. But the fact is that to speak or not to speak a
language depends on the rational agreement of the people. These days, Amharic is widely spoken
all over the country. This realty convinced Ethiopians to use it as a national language. But if the
Oromo language better communicates people than Amharic, there is no reason for not agreeing
to take it as a national language. This is because that a social contract is open for improvements.
The basic thing, according to social contract, is that once we agreed to use a certain language as a
national language, we have to accept that the language is ours, and we have to use it when the
context requires it. Here, the equality of the other languages could be compromised for a good
end. But, this does not mean that the other languages should not give function to their own
community both in official circles and in common day to day activities. It is so because there is
no conception of either elimination or assimilation as far as social contract is concerned; it is
rather a political thought that enhances a general good and security of all contracting partners.

However, Rebecca’s nationalist ideology does not give room to such a linguistic reality.
According to Ferdinand de Saussure, language itself is nothing but the result of agreement
(Quinn, 2006: 399). If language itself is the result of an agreement, there is no reason for its use
not to be the result of a contract. But, the author strongly condemns the use of mother tongue in
elementary education. She feels that this could deteriorate the unity of the people. However, the
fact is that the unity in a social contract is neither a national dogmatic gathering nor a groundless
collection, rather a rational bond based on mutual interest. Saying this much on language as the
first important component of the author’s nationalist ideology, it is better to proceed to the
second important component, religion.

4.4.2.2 Religion
In the case of religion, the author is not as such sensitive to faith; yet, she acknowledges the
contribution of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church to the history and culture of the nation. The role
of the church in the history of Ethiopia since the Axumite kingdom is enormously discoursed in
this text. On the contrary, the role of other religions is not emphasized. Unlike the case with

69
language, her approach to religion is descriptive, not prescriptive. But in her entire discussion,
the history of the country and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church are taken as the two sides of the
same coin. She both blames and appreciates this church believing that it is the center of every
good or bad of the country. Rebecca described this as:
Over the centuries, isolated from other Christian centers, the Ethiopian
state and the Ethiopian church fought parallel battles of survival. The
church’s traditions are thus nearly inseparable from Ethiopian traditions,
and in a flash I saw how many criticism of the church as out of touch with
its modern congregants might be quite beside the point: the church is as
much about culture and national and individual identity as it is about
religion and faith. In times of upheaval, of which Ethiopia has been more
than its share, those traditions and that identity, rooted as they are in a
realm beyond the world of absolute monarchs and brutal militaries, must
be particularly seductive (p: 112).

According to this extract, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is at the forefront to entertain both the
praise and the blame concerning with the political history and tradition of the entire nation. This
is because of the fact that the church and the dominant ideologies of the days (before the Derg)
had experienced an intermarriage for centuries. It is this strength of the church that impressed the
author for the very reason that it matches with her strong nationalist ideology. When we come to
the faith, though she is an orthodox Christian, she is not that much strict to the rules or canons
perhaps because of her western exposure. With all the defects, Rebecca acknowledges the power
of the church in unifying the country and inculcating worldly ideologies in the people. She says,
“I am left to envy my parents and others for the world-ordering framework that Orthodox
Christianity provides them, even as I chafe at that framework’s limitations” (p: 122-123). This
concept of using religion as an ideological state apparatus is similar to that of Machiavelli’s. As
stated in Adams and Dyson (2007: 42) Machiavelli believes that a state religion is very important
for the inculcation and maintenance of civic virtue and national feeling. However, Christianity is
not his preference since he believes that it makes people weak and submissive. Unlike
Machiavelli, Rebecca asserts that the strength of Ethiopia as an old-aged sovereign country is
based on its long lasted Christian tradition. She did not even give room to other religions for
good or bad.

When this is seen from the angle of divine right theory, ideologies that come out of the church
gates create a strong social and political cohesion among the believers. This happens because of
70
people’s adherence to the willing of God rather than to the pressures of earthly authorities. Once
people are told that a king has come to power by the nomination of divine authority, they
automatically give their consent and consider that it is their duty to die to take care of it. This is a
very strong bond that builds unshakable nationalist ideology in the people of an entire nation.
Thus, Rebecca’s focus on the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is not different from such a role that a
state religion plays in the political arena of a country.

But the very important point is that we are, in principle, living in a social contract in which not
only consent but also contractual agreement of people is needed. To have a state religion,
therefore, seeks the other religious authorities and followers to accept the dominance of that
religion, which is in fact very difficult on these days. As a westernized lady and a lawyer by
profession, Rebecca is not strongly prescribing today’s Ethiopians to strive to have a state
religion. However, her being westernized and a lawyer could not soften her firm stand towards
having and using only one language. Because of this, her nationalist ideology is better reflected
in her discourse about language than in her discourse about religion.

4.4.2.3 Balkanization Vs the Glorious Past

Part two of Held at a Distance is about “The Historic North” which deals with the historical and
religious sites like Axum, Lake Tana, and Lalibela. Of these three, the case of Axum is relevant
to this sub-section. Because of the distance, her reconstruction of her Ethiopian identity before
her coming to the country clashed with what she practically experienced during her visit. Thus,
Rebecca describes her cumulative experience in this way:
Axum thus encompasses three distinct strands of Ethiopian identity:
ancient empire, Christian kingdom, and divided modern nation. My visit
to Axum brought me face- to- face with these strands, and the experience
left me feeling as though I had walked out of a theater before the final act.
As the curtains parted, I saw a familiar and inspiring Ethiopia reflected in
Axum’s older sites and stories. The specific accomplishments of ancient
Axum were new discoveries, but ones that fit with my preexisting idea of
Ethiopia as a nation of stature and achievement. Christian Ethiopia was
also familiar, known to me through my family’s faith. But Ethiopia as a
divided nation, reflected in the loss of Eritrea and the regionalism now
afoot in Axum itself, was an altogether different matter. I did not
recognize this last Ethiopia and I could not reconcile it with the national
image I had always assumed (p: 76-77).

71
Rebecca was highly impressed by the glorious past of her country, but her observation gave her
an image of a balkanized nation to her dismay. In this extract, the effect of the author’s
remoteness and nearness in ideological reconstruction is clearly observed. These factors resulted
in contradictory experiences in Rebecca’s life. Because of her remoteness from Ethiopia, she
used to believe that the first two strands of Axum best describe her Ethiopian identity as acquired
from a family state apparatus. But her nearness, as a result of her visit, shows that Ethiopia is a
divided country among several regional states. The very problem, therefore, is that she was
unable to reconcile this contradiction. The main important reason is that the nationalist ideology
that Rebecca had before her coming to Ethiopia was to a large extent externally imposed by her
family and, to a small extent, independently acquired from her own readings; both are secondary
sources. What is important is that her previous position has become a source of resentment about
the current Ethiopian federal system. But later, Rebecca’s involvement seems to help her realize
the feeling that others might have when they are not as free as they want to be. She stated this in
the following manner:

Always the distanced observer, I have previously regretted Eritrean

independence only to the extent that I think it is a mistake for African
nations to follow an ethnicist logic that focuses people on fighting each
other for a greater share of national resources rather than working together
to grow the common wealth. For my father and other Ethiopians for whom
there is no distance between identity and a country, by contrast, Eritrean
secession is felt as a deep personal loss. As I began to understand and feel
the national and personal identities at stake, I began also to understand the
depth of his feeling—and to realize that others might feel the opposite just
as deeply (p: 85).
It is just later that Rebecca tried to understand the existence of other people’s opposite feeling
which amounts as strong as her father’s. According to Hobbes, man has a natural liberty for
living undisturbed by others and, therefore, should live as independent as he wishes. The reality
is that it is difficult to live in a total individualistic mode of life for there is nothing that
safeguards people from chaos. It is this threat that forced Hobbes to recommend a sovereign
authority to rule the naturally free men. Rebecca’s nationalist ideology is also similarly based on
the possible threat of Ethiopia’s fragmentation. Thus, her conception of unity is a Hobbesian type
of social contract. Had it been Locke’s type of social contract, the very basic rationale of unity
would have been to safeguard the right of men that the natural law granted them. Believing that
72
God has given people the natural laws to do good and avoid bad, Locke asserts that the very
reason of the social contract is to live peacefully and freely within the limit of the laws by uniting
to punish those who transgress them. Because of this, Rebecca’s unity is not Locke’s type, rather
Hobbes’s. Her main target is not to enhance equality and liberty, rather to escape from the threat
of fragmentation. But if these basic natural rights are not primarily secured, the occurrence of
fragmentation is inevitable.

In general, Rebecca has reflected her nationalist ideology, which strives to see linguistic
commonality, to appreciate religious instrumentality, and to compromise ethnic diversity. For not
achieving these things, she boldly forwards her commentary on the current Ethiopian
government; it is blamed for not intervening to bring the kind of unity she proposed. Unlike the
other texts, Rebecca’s is the one in which ideological tension is observed. This tension is caused
by her surrender to two people who have opposite ideologies: Getachew’s nationalism and
Tadesse’s liberalism. The second is treated here below.

4.4.3 Rebecca’s Liberalist Ideology

The second major ideology Rebecca has reflected in her text is liberalism. Just like the former
one (nationalism), this ideology (liberalism) is also not originally her own position, rather
Engineer Tadesse’s. But her writing shows that she is comfortably immersed in this kind of
thought. Even she explicitly admits that she shares his ideas—“As for me, after three weeks of
being around Tadesse, I must have come under his influence” (p: 70). One of the manifestations
of Tadess’s influence on her is that she is eager to decode and critically see his ideas. She says,
“I have always been intrigued by my uncle’s atypical personality and views, and listening to him
that afternoon and throughout our stay in Addis Ababa, I tried to distill his business and political
ideology” (p: 60). Though both her father and her uncle influenced her thinking, the two are
very different and even opposite in their ideologies. The first is conservatively nationalist while
the second is progressively liberal. Very frequently, the author has mentioned the undermining
critical tones of Tadesse against Getachew. The following discourse shows part of this:
My uncle was teasing me about my father, of course, but I also heard a
serious note in his words. Tadesse does believe that the university
professors and students who thirty years ago led widespread demands for
political freedoms, land redistribution and more egalitarian distribution of
wealth, were naïve about the nature and limits of state power (p: 54).
73
Basically, Tadesse is a man of deeds. He wants to run his business without hindering others, and
without being hindered by others. Though he was a victim of governments since the Derg time,
he did not extinguish hope in finding solutions to the problems he faced. He wants to
independently compete in the business world. Though he is a committed man, the frequent
government intervention was/is affecting the effectiveness of his companies. This situation has
frustrated Rebecca more than it annoyed Tadesse. It is when she intervened in this condition of
the companies that her liberalist ideology is clearly reflected. She says:

Could he (Tadesse) really afford to be agnostic about politics when, as I

saw it, his private companies and business decisions were so clearly
affected by the political climate? At the most basic level, bad government
means that many good companies are hindered by administrative
corruption. The monarchy, the Derg, and now the TPLF, all favored
business connected to people in power, so that the most successful
companies in Ethiopia are rarely the best-run (p: 63).
Rebecca states that the deliberate involvement of the Ethiopian governments or high ranking
officials was/is intentionally devised to paralyze the overwhelming effects of large business
organizations. This idea of Rebecca is highly related to the threats of economic imperialism.
Socialists, especially Lenin believe that, if large economic corporations limitlessly accumulate
wealth, they do have high degree of possibility to control the political realm of their countries of
origin, and even have cross national effects. Thus, the author associates the intervention of the
Ethiopian governments with fear of economic imperialism. Observing the entire scenario, she
also expresses her disillusionment this way:

To my dismay, I witnessed plenty of evidence that Tadesse’s business

cannot remain competitive and profitable indefinitely in the current
climate. His construction company pays the price of government
corruption in the form of lucrative public contracts lost to well-connected
competitors or in frustrating appearances before uncooperative
bureaucracies (p: 64).
This discourse is very intensive in conveying core issues like competition, profit, corruption,
favoritism, and bureaucracy. The term profit oriented competition refers to capitalism, which is
the economic version of liberalism. Thus, she advocates competition in business dealings. The
other important issue she raised in this discourse is injustice. Substantively, all businessmen
could not share the benefit of contracts in a fair way because of favoritism; contractors who do
74
have strong link with government are privileged in easily winning the contracts. This situation,
as Rebecca stated it, hampers the spirit of competition among non-parasitic and confident
businessmen. All these textual evidences, therefore, show that the second ideology of the author
is liberalism.

To recap, Rebecca’s two major ideologies are nationalism and liberalism. Her father and her
uncle have contributed enormously to her ideological reconstruction. Since she was made to
leave her country in her childhood, her ideologies were formulated based on second hand
sources; her nationalist ideology was constructed from her family before her coming to Ethiopia;
and her liberalist ideology was also constructed based on her uncle’s woe about the situation in
the business world of Ethiopia. Because of these reasons, her writing reflects her remoteness
from the events she has raised.

4.5 Ideological Plane in Notes from the Hyena’s Belly

4.5.1 Summary of the Text
Naga Mezlekia’s Notes from the Hyena’s Belly is also a memoir which talks about the social,
cultural, religious, moral and political situation of Ethiopia in a satirical manner. Though he
emphasizes on a specific case in Jijiga town, the book tells us what happened as a result of the
political system of the day. Nega starts with the analogy of the delay of Queen Menen’s death
and his reluctance to leave his mother’s womb. Through this, he expresses the unbearable
challenges that he has gone through. The search of an unscratched child that was to be sacrificed
to compromise the death of the dying queen created a terror among the parents and children of
the time.

The other important thing is the issue of morality between the people of the north and south parts
of the town (Jigiga). The people of the north are Christian people originally from Amhara, while
that of the south are Muslim Somali people who, according to Nega, are downgraded by the
north because of their “immorality”. After all, Nega claims that he was born and grown up in the
north among people of aristocratic moral set up. However, he asserts that he is also impressed by
the southern way of life, and criticizes the strictness and hypocrisy of his own community.

75
Politically, Nega has tried to portray the relationship between the mass and the emperor through
the intermediary of the landowners. He, as a member of the young intellectuals, led a small
demonstration with his friends to insist the king on taking measures against the exploitative acts
of the land lords. However, this demonstration, which was accompanied by the motto of “Land
to the Tiller”, resulted in fatal consequences for Nega and his friends. At a national level, the
movement of the young intellectuals (students) and other social groups accompanied by the
Wollo Famine was the very reason for the down fall of the Emperor; however, the military force
took power by eliminating those who raise the issue of having a civilian government. Because of
this, as Nega says, a handful of citizens became victims of the power thirsty members of the
junta. He, therefore, decided to fight this new version of his country’s ill-fate by creating a
common front with the nearby guerrilla fighters of the Western Somali Liberation Movement.
This time, he lost his best friend, Wondwesson. As time went on, he felt a sort of non-
belongingness as a result of the negative attitude of the Somali fighters towards him and others
of the Amhara descendants. Finally, he decided to go back home, and ask for forgiveness to the
military government; this resulted in a short imprisonment for Nega.

After his release from prison, he continued his studies, and became an instructor in Alamaya
College of Agriculture. Because of his mother’s death by a bullet of the Somali fighters, he was
forced to shoulder family responsibility. To help his siblings for some years, he missed many
scholarships; but he lastly went to Netherlands for his further education and then to Canada in
search of a better job under a cover of a short visit. This time, Nega faced the challenges of the
diaspora life both from the inhospitality of the officers of the host country and the hardship of his
siblings at home. Generally, this book shows the author’s views and reactions with the social,
cultural, and religious realities of his community; the political systems of both the monarchal and
military regimes, his short stay with the Somali fighters together with his friends, his short
imprisonment in Jigiga, his academic life in Alamaya College of Agriculture, his scholarship in
Netherlands and diaspora life in Canada, and his relation with his Ethiopian family.

His ideologies, therefore, are reactions to the dominant ideologies of the governments in power.
For he was a young revolutionary political activist, Nega’s ideology during the monarchal
government of Haile Selasie was Marxism-Leninism, a reaction to the old Feudo-Capitalism.
After the feudal system had collapsed, the Marxist-Leninist Ideology became the dominant
76
ideology of the day during the Derg regime. This time, because of the “wrong dose of scientific
socialism”, Nega was forced to shift his ideology to Liberalism. What makes Nega different from
the other authors of the texts under this study is that he recognizes and appreciates the noble
achievements of the leaders against whose ideology that he writes about. To look into the details,
a brief discussion about these ideologies is treated below.

4.5.2 Nega’s Marxist-Leninist Ideology

During the reign of Haile Selasie, Nega was a young student who actively participated in the
unique and first students’ demonstration in the Jijiga town, where the emperor made a visit to the
newly built school. The main source of political inspiration for Nega is his school friend Fekadu,
a poor rural student and victim of the feudal system. Nega was very eager to hear all sorts of
exploitation that the peasants were forced to experience. The serfdom put Nega to a confusion
since that early age of his, and enabled him to critically think why this happened. He himself
states this as follows:
As a young boy who’d grown up inspired by this democratic atmosphere,
it was a shock to learn about the existence of such a monster as the
“Feudal lord” who kept a world of peasants on his leash, deciding what
crops they would grow and what their share of the harvest would be. I
asked many questions, but above all, I wondered why ownership of land,
which in my boyish imagination was no different from any other personal
possession, should require a complex tenure system, and armies of
musketeers for enforcement (Nega, 2000: 99-100).
The young Nega, from the outset, was engaged in a political realm of the Marxist-Leninist
thinking. And by raising a basic question of political philosophy (ownership of land), he implied
another step forward to the ideological plane. This issue of land is the starting point of the
Ethiopian Marxist-Leninist Ideology. The boy, Nega, as an Ethiopian has dealt with the basic
issues of land, like the right for ownership of land, freedom to choose economic production, full
right to possess and consume one’s own production. Nega further complains about the complex
tenure system of the day. Philosophically, according to Rozick, complications are there if there is
no just procedure of property acquisition and transfer. When we see the case at hand, it is unjust
for some group to have the whole and for others to have nothing. Had it been as per Locke,
things would have been turned upside down. His “mixing principle” tells us that it is a must to
mix labour with nature to claim an ownership right to something. In this case, it is the peasant

77
not the Feudal lord that mixed labour with nature and, therefore, the right to claim for ownership
is of the former not of the later. The root cause for not able to ensure the rights for decision and
consumption is this problem of ownership. This pre-action imagination of the kid is a very
sufficient position to put him under the ideological category of Marxism-Leninism. But, to
further strengthen this, it is important to see his later open political activism as a school boy as it
is stated below:

Five students, including myself, volunteered to organize the rally. We

prepared the placards with “Land to the Tiller!” motto clearly written in
big black ink letters on a white background. On the appointed day, we sent
coded messages to each classroom so that the students would be ready.
The piece of paper bearing the coded note was passed from hand to hand,
desk to desk, before the classroom doors opened and smiling faces
emerged. They came out in ones and twos, to the complete bewilderment
of the teacher, who was not aware of the revolution brewing under his
nose until the buildings had been completely vacated (p: 103-104).
Therefore, one can learn from these extracts that Nega was imaginatively leapt to the Marxist-
Leninist ideology formerly, and actively involved in the revolution in the later years. Through his
tales and satirical prose narratives, he has successfully reflected his Marxist-Leninist ideology.
The main themes of Nega’s ideology are conveyed through the higher classes’ traditional and
religious beliefs, morality and hypocrisy, and economic exploitation. The author has used a local
setting to reflect the situation of the day. He views the town of Jijiga by dividing it into the north
and the south, the former dwelt by Christians who came from the northern highlands, and the
later dwelt by Muslim Somali. In most of his discourses, he uses the cases in the north and the
south in a comparative manner. The Christian highlanders are treated as the privileged in all sorts
because of their root in the imperial palace whereas the Somali are taken as unprivileged and
distant in many ways from their northern neighbors. Now, let us see the ideological
manifestations of the author in the following sub-sections.

4.5.2.1 Traditional and Religious Beliefs

Nega starts his writing by raising three difficult coincidences: coming of a lost rain, Queen
Menen’s a near to death illness, and Nega’s reluctance to birth. The rain made the land green;
Nega came out of womb unwillingly; but Queen Menen was still at the verge of death. For Nega,
the midwives prophesized that he “would lead the life of a rebel, as he has refused to be born

78
wearing his golden crown” (p: 4-5). And for Queen Menen, clever witch doctors were hunted to
bring the cure no matter from where. This takes us to the traditional beliefs of the higher class.
This is what happened:
Meanwhile, somewhere far away, the Devil-tamer pronounced his cure for
Queen Menen: the sacrifice of the young. “Candidates must be free of any
form of body piercing; they must have no wounds or scars that would
compromise the quality of the blood,” he announced. Countless
messengers were dispatched from the palace to scour the countryside
looking for children who had neither bruises nor scars (p: 5).
The author has uncovered the evils that the higher class had been practicing behind the curtain.
Here, it is a single person, though a queen, who faced her own fate of being ill. She is matured;
she enjoyed life in her palace; after all she is mortal and had to welcome death if it is beyond all
possible legal treatments. But what was done is to hunt a young, innocent, and spotless person
that takes her share of death and gives his own life to the betterment of the queen. In here, the
basic natural rights of equality and liberty are awfully violated. For the survival of one from the
royal family, the death of another from the lower class was legitimized. This could not have a
legal basis, rather a base on traditional belief. The basic contention is that a one to one
correspondence with regard to the life of the higher class and the life of the lower class was
unthinkable. It is this basic problem of equality that led to the insecurity of the innocent mass. To
support this reality, the author included the story of “the donkey who sinned.” In this story, it is
unambiguously the lion, the leopard, and the hyena who are sinners, but the donkey was
sentenced death when it was the only one not sinned. This is nothing more than the saying,
“might is right”. In the case of Queen Menen, the measure that was taken was considered right
because she was mightier than the candidate for death.

The other important thing about the traditional beliefs of the northern Christian highlanders,
those who claim that they are chosen for kingship, is reflected through Wondwossen’s family.
Wondwessen is a prayer boy that was born after his mother lost two boys. The death of her sons
puzzled Mrs. Aster, and what she did was to search a medicineman and a fortune teller. When
this did not give remedy, she started begging saints, spirits of her ancestors, and the Adbar. Nega
has elaborated what a holy man from Madagascar told Mrs. Aster in this way:

79
 “Your marriage is cursed,” beamed the holy man, suddenly opening his
eyes. “Someone on your husband’s side of the family has thrown a spell
on you not to raise a boy.” Close relations often cursed one another this
way, to prevent inheritors. It was a common practice especially in the
northern highlands, where farmland is a communal property and each boy
born to one or another family in the community is seen as a threat, since
he is entitled to a share of land when he grows up. Mrs. Aster Tekle,
however, was not a farmer. It must have been out of a sheer habit that
someone cast the spell on her. Mrs. Aster Tekle sobbed, for this lone old
man had confirmed to her what she had always suspected, that her
enemies were her husband’s relations (p: 155-156).
This discourse shows how the tradition of the northern highlands mystifies death and bad fortune
as abstract incidents caused by human beings. The very initial cause for this type of suspicion,
however, is the material world. Sharing land is taken as the very cause of males’ death since it is
handed down from generation to generation. The very important thing is that females were not
victims of death since they were basically victims for not having the right to share land. This
feudal traditional practice is based on the greedy nature of human beings. In the state of nature,
all human beings are entitled with equal share of the world and unrestricted freedom of living
and using what nature provides to all of them. Males and females came to this world in the same
way, and they have the same right to live as free as possible. According to this text, land is the
very threat of the male fellow since the competition to own and maintain a good share of land is
associated with the act of killing other’s male offspring. This shows that the communal
ownership of the resource of land has no strong basement. Rozick asserts that an ownership
without just procedure of acquisition and transfer leads to human insecurity. As per Rawls, it is
possible to distribute this primary good for the advantage of the aggregate. According to
Marxist-Leninists, this type of communal property ownership which is accompanied by killing
fellow generation is the result of the false consciousness of the hidden capitalist desire.

The second important tool that helped the northern highlanders to mystify their power is religion.
He satirically treated the Christian tradition and belief very extensively. The Christians are
criticized for their strong desire of miracles, mixing religion and Adbar, exploiting others in the
name of the church, and praying for bad consequences. Nega uses the discourse of religion to
show the belief of the Christian highland exploiters who consider the exploited low land nomads

80
as atheists. Where there are exploiters, the author asserts, there is a church that helps the
successful accomplishment of their mission. He further describes the condition as follows:

The subsequent rise to fame of the Kulibi church of St. Gabriel was
nothing short of a miracle. The local farmers were the first to reap the
benefits of St. Gabriel’s patronage. The prayers of the people of Kulibi
were swiftly answered—whether they prayed for rain, a good harvest, twin
calves, the death of a neighbor or the birth of a child. Year after year, the
size and extent of pleas increased, and St. Gabriel did not waver—the
rains came on time, the harvest was abundant, the people were prolific,
and many enemies fell dead through the intervention of St. Gabriel, who
granted all requests but the most sinful. In return, the church receives
generous sacrifices in the form of bulls, sheep, goats, grain and even gold.
In less than two decades, the poor cottage had been replaced by a majestic
building whose cathedral dome was inlaid with gold and marble. Nothing
of its like had been seen in the region before (p: 264).
As a Marxist-Leninist, he dared to criticize the church for its mystified belief in the world of
spirits, and its active involvement in the economic affairs of this physical world. He satirically
commented the inappropriate requests of the prayers and their assumptions for the involvement
of the divine power for bad ends. Nega is critical of the divine right of kings; it is because of the
fusion of the state and the church that his criticism equally targeted to both the monarchy and the
Orthodox Christian Church. He blames the church for amassing wealth in a short period of time.
In short, the author has reflected the role of the traditional and religious beliefs of the Christian
highland kingdom in fostering the exploitation of the lower class by the higher class.

4.5.2.2 Morality and Hypocrisy

This issue of morality and hypocrisy is better conveyed through the discourse of Mr. Alula, the
morality teacher in Nega’s school. He had been teaching his students, including Nega, all sorts of
moral behavior. He used to advise them saying, “It is immoral…to swear in the name of our
father when the father of all, king Haile Selasie, is still on the throne” (p: 46). Because of his
strictness, Nega and many other friends of him do not like the teacher. On the contrary, Nega’s
father likes to talk with Mr. Alula most often. The author says, “Dad had a very high regard for
morality, and believed that Mr. Alula was the most moral person in town. After all, Mr. Alula
was from the northern highlands, the seat of all great kings, the place that holds all the virtues of
that old kingdom….(p: 48). Shortly, this was a man strived to be morally perfect.

81
However, he was finally found to be a hypocritical kind of person. Above all, he had his own
slave at home. This was the time that Emperor Haile Selasie was recognized as an African who
abolished the slave trade from his country, and made his country a member of the League of
Nations. But Mr. Alula, who claims to swear in the name of the king, was found running slavery.
As a Marxist-Leninist, Nega portrayed the continuity of slavery in the monarchy though the state
was internationally acknowledged as free from the evil of the practice. Slavery is basically the
worst stage of classist society. Slaves mostly do not get a room for natural equality and freedom
in monarchal governments; they are considered as if they were created to serve the royal class
and no more beyond. This, in fact, is not the will of God, and cannot be legitimatized in the
divine right of kings. According to St. Augustine, no one has the right to control the other. Both
in the state of nature and in social contract, people do not face such a problem of basic liberty
and equality.

The other important hypocritical engagement of Mr. Alula is his hypothetical advisory service to
the king. He put the dos and don’ts that could help smoothly handle the case of the Somali
nomads living near to Jijiga. In case these tribes try to make an uprising, Mr. Alula argues that
the king should not send troops. He confidently asserts that it can be handled very easily and
quite morally. This is the advice that he would have given provided that he had been asked for
help:

The moral solution to this perpetual problem, continued Mr. Alula,

gulping down his areke and wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his jacket,
was to dispatch another Somali tribe against them. The two tribes must
already be ripe for a fight, perhaps because of an argument over grazing
land, a dry water hole or the direction of the wind. A couple of truckloads
of chat and half a dozen camels sent to the tribal chiefs would do the trick.
The friendly tribe would raid the hostile tribe, burn their settlement to the
ground, and bring them to their knees. To the casual observer this might
seem immoral, but that would be because that he was only a casual
observer (p: 49).
In many ways, Mr. Alula pretend to appear morally smarter than everyone in the town. Even
when he teaches his students, he starts his lessons after exposing and condemning the students’
immoral acts, like throwing ball through the head of elders, females’ running on the street and
other ordinary simple games that do not harm the children. But he himself is involved in such a

82
very critical issue of life and death. This is nothing more than hypocrisy. For the Marxist-
Leninist Nega, this hypocrisy does have a meaning beyond this; it is typically an imperial tactic
for domination and exploitation through divide and rule. The other moral and Christian principle
of Mr. Alula is his due regard to dogs and hyenas. He advocates protection of hyenas so as to
reduce homelessness; no hyena means abundance of street dwellers that create the mess of the
town. Here, instead of creating rehabilitating mechanisms, threatening the poor by hyena so as to
not dwell on the street is preferred. This shows the status given to the exploited poor by the
“moral” Christian highlanders.

4.5.2.3 Nega’s Reaction against Economic Exploitation

Nega was inspired to act against the monarchy because of the then economic exploitation that the
rural farmers were made to face with. Though he was not a rural boy, he had got the access that
enabled him to know the economic hardship that the peasants were suffering from. Nega’s
informant about the miserable life of the farmers is his best friend Fekadu. The author stated this
in the following way:
Fekadu told me that when the Emperor brought western Ethiopia under his
control in the late nineteenth century, he confiscated all the land and
divided it into three parts: one-third each was then given to the church, the
state, and worthy local people—the later being the traditional leaders of
the region. The church’s share was further divided among its hierarchy.
The states share was also broken up and granted to various warlords who
had helped to subdue the region and were now overseeing its
administration. Since there was no paid army in those days, the warlords
paid their officers and men in kind: they broke down parts of their own
land share and gave them to their soldiers to work (p: 95-96).
Because of this tenancy system, Fekadu’s family lost two-third of their land; suffered from the
hostile treatment of the new landlords; and were forced to give their produce to church, and to
central and local governments. It is because of this harsh living condition that the family
hopelessly left their original place behind them to supplement themselves by the meager income
they earn from their labour. In the eyes of the Marxist-Leninists, this sort of economic
exploitation intolerably leads to arouse immediate revolutionary measures. This condition of his
friend’s family exploitation, and the landlords’ unfair treatment to the peasants in general better
stimulated Nega to take part in the revolutionary struggle aimed at overthrowing the monarchy.

83
After the 1974 coup, the military junta called the two parties, namely Ethiopian people’s
Revolutionary Party (EPRP) and All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement Party (Meison) to debate on
how to run the government. The former preferred a civilian government to immediately come to
power while the second agreed a tentative stay of the junta in power and then a gradual coming
of a civilian government. The young intellectuals and the civilian mass supported the first while
the military junta agreed with the second. Nega, by this time, inclined to the former. He seriously
started studying the basic theories and principles of the basic variants of socialism. This is stated
by him as follows:

School was still out, and I spent the following months feverishly reading
Marx, Lenin, and Mao. I amassed more knowledge in those few months
than I might have in years of study at some respectable institute in
Moscow. I still had a few misgivings about the viability of communism
and its various canons, but I kept these doubts to myself. Indeed, Marxist
philosophy is filled with noble ideas—a classless society in which no one
is economically exploited by another, a society where “Everyone works
according to his ability and is provided for according to his needs,” a
society where there is no form of discrimination or favoritism, a society
where… It was quite a neat package, but I suspected that it had been
delivered to the wrong universe (p: 142).
Lenin’s ideology is fundamentally based on that of Marx, and is contextualized to the realities of
Russia. The things that Lenin added are supposed to quickly foster these basic and noble ideas of
Marx. It is because of this that Nega as a supporter of the progressive party is characterized as an
advocate of the Marxist-Leninist ideology. This ideology goes in line with the hypothetical life
of the state of nature. It is based on the natural equality of human beings. It also safeguards the
liberty of everyone by avoiding exploitation and enhancing sharing. At large, the end of the
ideology— communism, is conceived from that imaginative world of state of nature. It is a quick
step backward to the original and innocent nature of early men. As Rousseau said, it is private
ownership of property and thereby greedy amassing of wealth that spoiled the stable condition of
the state of nature. Therefore, as he put it, Nega’s inclination to the Marxist-Leninist ideology
has a very genuine politico-philosophical foundation. But because of the mess the military junta
created while practicing, and even because of many of its ideal principles, the author tended to
glance at another ideological option, liberalism.

84
 4.5.3 Nega’s Liberalist Ideology
As the tone of his writing indicates, Nega has better internalized Marxism-Leninism than
Liberalism. The second one has not emitted from Nega’s own strong ideological stand, rather
from the weaknesses of the Junta. For many years, the Junta and Meison had been working
together by attacking their common enemy, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party. Except
the timing difference on when a civilian government should come to power, the two parties did
not show ideological difference. This shows that Nega had not a basically different ideology
from the military government. What led him to a liberalist ideological option is nothing beyond
the failure of the junta in effectively implementing the principles to bring the desired outcome.
The author acknowledges the noble achievement of the junta with regard to land reform.
However, it was not free from criticism; the land was distributed by unjust leaders of the peasant
association who were soiled in corruption. Moreover, the possession had not a strong ground.
The basic issues that led the writer to liberalism are free market economy and privatization. But
the plane of the ideology is very shallow since he was not seriously and extensively engaged in
the detailed discussion of the conceptions. The situation with market is reflected in this way:

The peasant had to cope with another obstacle: the socialized market.
Peasants were required to sell, at a bare minimum, fifty percent of their
produce to the state-run “Agricultural Marketing Corporation” (AMC).
Naturally, the AMC set the price. The balance of the produce could be
sold at the local market or consumed by the members of the peasant
household, but roadlocks, checkpoints and other methods halted anyone
from smuggling grain into the cities (p: 320).
In this discourse, the author has raised the problem of government intervention in the market
affairs. In fact, this is not a simple intervention but a strong and structured control of the market
system. Because of this centralized control, the peasants were denied their rights of giving their
agricultural products to their relatives living in cities. This condition went beyond economic
regulation to the violation of basic human liberty. Individuals were not left free to do whatever
they like with their property. According to Locke, the farmers had fulfilled the requirements for
property ownership; they were given their share of land and mixed their labour with nature to get
the desired outcome. But the status of ownership as reflected in this text is very much paralyzed.
Transferring products either by selling or by gift was awfully restricted if it did not get consent
from the check points, which most often did not happen. Nega, thus, is condemning this
85
restriction on the right of property ownership, and implies that the mighty hands of the junta had
to be pulled back to their proper political craft.

The second important point that led the author to a liberalist ideology is the gap that he observed
between collectivization and privatization. He also criticizes the inexpert innovation of state land
which made the greatest share of the fertile land under the possession of the government. This is
a basic question of privatization. The very typical ideological inclination of the author towards
liberalism is reflected through his criticism of collectivization by favoring to the small-scale
agriculture of individual farmers. Through his comparative view, individuation and healthy
progressive changes are detected as important features of liberalism. This is explicitly and
empirically stated by the author like this:

Collective farms were slow to progress…In one memorable act of

defiance in early September 1979, a hundred and fifty people in the
province of Sidamo were done to death by the regime for protesting
against collectivization. Other peasants manage to express their
displeasure in a less risky but powerful way: through output. A 1983
report by the Ministry of Agriculture confirmed what we had always
known, that private farms invariably outperform collective ones.
Comparative yields for private and collective farms tell the whole story:
for barley, private farms produced an average of 11.5 quintals per hectare
while collective farms yielded just 6.48; for wheat, the comparative yield
was 13.2 to 2.38; for maize, 20.2 to 11.05; for sorghum, 12.5 to 3.47; and
for teff, the main staple food of most Ethiopians, the figure was staggering
11.3 to 0.52 (p: 321-322).
Unlike Aristotle, who believes that man is a social and political animal, other political
philosophers including social contract theorists believe that man is originally a selfish and
unsocial animal. Our socialized and politicized life is simply an artificial device that was
constructed to escape from the inevitable chaos of the state of nature. It is because of this that
socialism is criticized by liberalists as anti-human nature. By nature, we want to compete with
others and become winners, and we want to enjoy the fruit of our effort without restriction. On
the other hand, the loser suffers the consequences of his inefficiency with no claim to share the
outcome of the winner; thus, exploitation is the byproduct of this reality. This shows that the
efficiency of the private farms and the inefficiency of the collective ones are caused by the
presence and absence of competition respectively; the private farmers became successfully more

86
productive than their collective counterparts as a result of their competitive effectiveness, which
is the core principle of liberalism.

4.6 Comparative Analysis of Political Philosophy

Conducting a comparative study of political philosophy without first studying the ideological
plane of the subject under study is quite difficult. It is because of this reason that the ideological
plane of each text has been treated separately in the preceding sections. The finding, therefore, is
used to further study the commonalities and differences of political philosophy reflected in the
texts. As it has been stated in the methods and procedures section, the comparison is conducted
thematologically. Specifically, Given’s (2008: 101) “Constant Comparative Analysis” is used to
see how each text treats a certain issue. This is done by selecting core issues from the area that is
needed to be studied in a comparative manner, and see what was said about the issues by each
text. In this study, what is needed to be comparatively seen is the political philosophy that the
texts conveyed through the major ideologies. Therefore, core issues of political philosophy,
specifically nature of good and bad governments, attributes of good and bad governace, effects
of good and bad governance are selected. In addition to these, the way forward as suggested by
the authors and the morality of the writers are among the core issues selected for comparison.

4.6.1 Nature of Good and Bad Governments

In talking about the core issues, the starting point for every discussion is the ideological plane.
To begin, Maaza has reflected major ideologies, like Feudo-Capitalism, Marxism-Leninism, and
Fascist Nationalism. Based on the plane of the ideologies, a good government as reflected in her
text is one whose leader is elected by people to serve them as per their interest; one that never
prioritizes its interest by exploiting the people that gave it power. This nature of a good
government is not explicitly stated by the author, rather inferred from the ideological plane of
what the characters raised in their discourses. On the other hand, a bad government is one that
claims as if its power is God-given or military based, and considers the people as subjects or
defenselessly weak.

Unlike Maaza, Hama asserts that there is no good government to be praised; all are awfully bad.
His critical commentary is not limited only to the Ethiopian governments like what Maaza did,
but mercilessly and unboundedly criticizes all governments across the world. This shows that his
87
ideology is liberalist anarchism. Maaza’s view of good and bad governments is inferred from the
ideologies she reflected in her text; to the opposite, Hama’s ideology is inferred from his view
that all governments are bad. But, his idea is quite different from the radical anarchists, who
believe that a society does not need government at all. He is not also suggesting the kind of
government that he believes is good. Hama describes bad governments as brutal, corrupt, and
cynical.

When we come to Rebecca, she has raised two major ideologies: nationalism and liberalism. But
when one deeply studies the ideological plane, she is immersed in an ideological tension. Thus,
her view about a good and a bad government is also affected by this tension. As a nationalist, a
good government for Rebecca is one that creates a strong and unified Ethiopia whose people
speak the same language; one that discourages diversity based on ethnicity and acknowledges the
role of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in the history, culture and politics of the nation. On the
contrary, a bad government for her is stated as a regionally and ethnically divided authority
whose people speak different languages. She argues that such a government weakens the national
unity and common belongingness of national identities, like history, culture and religion.

Rebecca’s second ideology is liberalism. With regard to this ideology, a good government as per
Rebecca is one that leaves its citizens free to do whatever they believe is good for themselves. It
encourages competition in a justifiable manner. The freedom in Rebecca’s ideology focuses
more on economy. On the other hand, she describes a bad government as a government that
intervenes in large business companies to make them less powerful. In sum, her concept of
government intervention varies with her ideologies; as a nationalist, she needs it; but as a
liberalist, she does not need it. Her perception of good and bad governments is also affected by
this variation.

As compared to Maaza, Rebecca did not deal with how a government should come to power. A
bad government in Maaza’s work is seen from the angle of exploitation and terrorization while in
Rebecca’s is seen from the angle of intervention and non-intervention. Unlike Hama, Rebecca
recognizes the presence of both good and bad governments, and indicates that a government that
maintains national unity by intervention and leaves them free through reservation when it comes
to economy is good for Ethiopia.

88
With regard to Nega, he has ideological similarity with Maaza for both extensively dealt with
Marxism-Leninism; his liberalist ideology also relates him to Rebecca for both of them
concluded their former ideologies with a liberal option. Just like Maaza, Nega views a good
government as one that never exploits its people based on class rather distributes resources fairly,
and never threatens civilians rather stands for their security. Like Rebecca, he also views good
and bad governments based on his liberalist ideology. In this case, Nega’s perception of a good
government concentrates on privatization—a government that lets citizens to have their own
shares with full authority of ownership is a good government. On the other hand a government
that takes the lion share to itself, its officials and its kinsmen, but empties the mass is a bad
government; even a government that shares property and resources to the ordinary mass, but
intervenes here and there is a bad government.

In general, the ideologies from which the nature of good and bad governments is derived are of
three types. The first type which is reflected in Maaza’s work is ideology of the time while the
second type is ideology of the author as reflected by Hama and Rebecca. The third type is the
combination of the two: ideology of the time and ideology of the author together. The third one
is reflected in Nega’s work since he was part and parcel of the political situation about which he
has written. When we see the scope, Hama has dealt with the international politics while others
have concentrated on the Ethiopian politics. Hama has totally written about the badness of all
governments while the rest of the three have written more of the badness of the last three
Ethiopian regimes though they have also included little of their goodness.

4.6.2 Attributes of Good and Bad Governance

As per Maaza’s work, good governance happens when those who are in power believe that they
are naturally equal to any ordinary powerless citizen, and recognize that everyone is free within
the limit of human law. In addition, fair distribution of benefits and burdens is extensively
treated as a major attribute to the very goodness of governance. On the contrary, mystification of
those who are in power as if they had a different nature from other human beings causes bad
governance. This mystification enables rulers to claim that they are elect of God, and no one can
take their power whatever wrong things they do till God intervenes. The other important cause of
bad governance, as reflected in Maaza’s text, is endangering the security of citizens. A
government that does not accept the freedom of citizens to live without threat becomes a cause
89
for bad governance. Officials, including the leaders, who amass wealth by making the people
impoverished, are important attributes to bad governance.

In Hama’s case, a cause of good governance is not a point of discussion here, for he has not yet
got a good government. Thus, only causes of bad governance are briefly treated in comparison
with others. Actually, it is better to say a bad relationship than a bad governance since Hama
deals with international relations. The very cause of a bad relation between the West and Non-
West is double standard. Because of this factor, the principles of equality and justice are always
violated. The other important point is hypocrisy of the developed and powerful west. The west
preaches about democracy; tells us that we all are equal; and admits that everyone is naturally
free, but the reverse happens when it comes to practice. The other important cause of bad
relationship between the West and the Non-west is the submissiveness of the later to the interests
of the former. When we come to Africa in general and Ethiopia in particular, Hama asserts that
the very attribute of bad governance is the dictatorship of the leaders. Like Maaza, Hama also
believes a leader’s coming to power without the consent and contract of the people is another
cause of bad governance. Unlike Maaza, he has not dealt with the specific causes of bad
governance with regard to Ethiopia; he rather generalized that the unelected dictators are the very
causes of the political mess.

Rebecca’s ideas about this core issue under discussion are quite different from that of both
Maaza and Hama. She asserts that the very causes of good governance are national unity and
economic freedom. As per her, these are the major factors that can bring a harmonious,
prosperous and strong nation. Unlike the preceding two, she has not emphasized on how the
leaders come to power and what the political structure should be. On the other hand, the causes
of bad governance according to Rebecca are regionalism, ethnicity, and government intervention
in economic affairs. She is also different from others, for she has mainly engaged in the political
situation of the current Ethiopian government.

For Nega, one of the causes for good governance is having non-divine and democratic leaders. In
most cases, Nega’s ideas are similar to that of Maaza’s. Thus, the other causes of good
governance are equality and freedom of citizens, and fair distribution of benefit and burden. On
the contrary, leaders who believe in divine and military forces, and exploit the poor based on

90
class are the major causes of bad governance as far as Nega is concerned. What makes Nega
different from others is that he blames governments for their bad deeds and acknowledges them
for the good things they did. Saying this much about the causes of good and bad governance, it is
important to proceed to the possible effects raised in the texts under study.

4.6.3 Effects of Good and Bad Governance

The causes of good governance, in Maaza’s text, are taken from those characters that are strived
to bring change. But when we come to the effects, the entire text is exclusively filled with the
effects of bad governance; there is no any effect of good governance. This is also true in the case
of Hama. Nega is exceptional in this case for he stated two good instances of the governments
that he strongly blames at the same time.
Therefore, the effects of bad governance as per Maaza, are exploitation, starvation, chaos,
casualty, imprisonment, and disillusionment. These lists of effects of bad governance are also
true in Nega’s case. The only difference is that Nega acknowledges the good effects of Haile
Selasie’s contribution to the peace and independence of Africa, and Derg’s role in land reform.
For Rebecca, effects of good governance are unity and economic freedom while regionalism,
socio-political fragmentation on the basis of language and ethnicity are effects of bad
governance. Having said this much about governments and governance, it is quite essential to
deal with the implications or suggestions that are forwarded by the writers themselves as options
for the future.

4.6.4 A Way Forward as Suggested by the Authors

All the texts under this study are historical prose narratives which mainly dealt with the past and
present. But the fact is that history is not only about the past and present, but also about the
future. Therefore, what these books suggest to be done in the future is equally as important as
what they say about the past and the present. With this regard, Maaza has recorded only the past
political experience of the country without dealing even with the present. Explicitly, she has said
nothing about what political ideology should be opted for the future. Like Maaza, Hama has also
focused on what happened in the past, but unlike her, he has strongly dealt with what is
happening in the present. Similarly, he has not clearly and explicitly said anything about what
should be done, and what ideology should be opted in the future. By implication, though there is
no any clear ideology suggested by these authors, Maaza has indicated the need for democratic
91
system of governance within which there is no exploitation, terrorization and mystification.
Hama has also indicated the need for international relations free from double standard and
hypocrisy. With regard to Africa in general and Ethiopia in particular, the implication is that
leaders should be democratically elected, and serve the people not for themselves.
Unlike both Maaza and Hama, Nega and Rebecca have commonly suggested a clear liberalist
ideology as a better option. Rebecca adds nationalism as a best remedy to unify the regionalized
Ethiopia. In general, the authors have reflected and criticized the political past and present of
Ethiopia, Africa, and the globe. Implicitly and explicitly, they have also suggested what to be
done in the future. The other important point to be seen below is how the authors behaved in
dealing with political issues.

4.6.5 The Morality of the Authors

Political philosophy deals with the politico-ethics of a given system of governance in a justifiable
and logical manner. Thus, political philosophers are based on reasons in judging the goodness
and badness of governments. The main issue here is to see the way how the authors treated the
issues about which they wrote their text. With this regard, Maaza and Rebecca have reflected
what they believed is a reality about Ethiopian politics. In doing so, their works indicate their
concern to morality. For instance, Maaza did not mention the name of the evil doers of the “Red
Terror” rather used only titles, and even gave them other names like Gudu. Similarily, Rebecca
has used only the initial letters of her uncles, whom she criticizes for their bad personal qualities,
and political achievements and stands. Nega is also not different from the two females in treating
the events that he believed for happening in the way he put them. His focus is more of with the
events than with people. The other thing is that his mode of writing is satirical, which helped him
not to be directly detected as non-ethical. In general, he cannot be blamed for having politico-
ethical/morality problems.

On the contrary, Hama’s work clearly shows his disregard to morality though he has raised very
genuine Pan-African and international issues. Though his satirical mode of writing softens some
of his ideas, there are two important things that clearly show his morality deviation from the
other authors under consideration. For one thing, he mostly uses offensive adjective as prefixes
of political leaders. These adjectives could have been better replaced by clear descriptions of the
detailed wrong deeds of the persons to whom they refer. The reason is that the detailed
92
description of wrong deeds convinces by far better than common and lower level insults. The
other point of deviation in Hama’s writing goes to his glossary of offense. His three pages
glossary of offense is the best indicator for the author’s violation of individual’s dignity. In fact,
the glossary is very long and includes countries, international organizations and media. In
general, the issue of morality, politico-ethics in this case, is a key matter that can affect the
rationality of authors.

93
 Chapter Five: Conclusion and Recommendations

5.1 Conclusion
Based on the findings of the entire analysis, the researcher has arrived at several conclusions.
Primarily, making judgments based on a raw ideology without studying the ideological plane is a
misleading act. Ideology gives energy that enables to enhance one’s own stand, and to oppose
that of others. On the other hand, studying the ideological plane gives wisdom to question the
level of reality of every thought and practice. In the Ethiopian case, the junta adopted the Marxist
–Leninist ideology to overthrow the monarchy. The military was successful in overthrowing the
king because of the energy of the ideology, but it could not win public support since the
practitioners were not able to go deep into the political philosophy of the ideology by
considering the basic components: liberty, equality, democracy and justice. Crisis often
happened as the ideology was hastily imported by leaving the basic philosophy at the market
place. This also happened even to the monarch whose ideology was far-fetched from the world
of angels.

Scope wise, the diasporic Ethiopian writings deal with national, continental and international
politics. Nation wise, most of the authors are stimulated by the past trauma of the domestic
politics of their country. In the texts under study, the discourses about the Derg regime take the
lion’s share. When we come to the continental themes, the grave problems of the African
continent are of two types: external and internal. Whatever effort the Africans make, their
development is at the mercy of the developed world. As long as the unfair game continues, the
black has to beg either a visa to migrate or a donation to settle. This is the result of double
standard. We Africans also have our own internal problems like worshiping the white and losing
confidence on ourselves. At the international level, the oil producing Middle East countries have
become battle fields because of the western interest on the resources of these countries, nothing
more. Because of the inclusion of these and many other common issues, the diasporic Ethiopian
literature in English is not restricted only to Ethiopia in significance; other countries can also
search their international status from these works.

The common denominator in all these texts is disillusionment. This can be understood from what
the writers say about themselves and their family, from their descriptions about the condition of
94
the general public, and from the situations of the characters. This disillusionment is still in their
veins, and has hindered them from writing something bright about the future of their country.

Though they lack the kind of government that they want to have, all the authors do not basically
deny the need for having government(s). The nature of good governments that individuals need
to have are as different as the nature of the individuals themselves. From this, it can be
concluded that it is difficult to have a government that satisfies the interest of all people; as long
as there are some satisfied groups, it is undeniable to have some other dissatisfied groups. In
sum, the very causes of political dissatisfaction are government problems related to liberty,
democracy, equality, and justice.

Another important point to be concluded from the finding is that the remoteness and nearness of
the authors to the events that they write about contributes a lot to the shallowness or deepness of
their ideologies. When an author uses second hand information for constructing her/his ideology,
the gap between the theory and practice sways the foundation of the ideology. On the other hand,
if the author is near to the events both as a participant and observer, the foundation of the
ideology becomes very strong and persuasive.

Beyond the economic influence of the western world on Africans, racism is also equally seen as
an inevitably critical problem of international relations. In principle, both the white and the black
claim that all human beings are naturally equal and free. But in practice, the black leans to its
inferiority while the white does the same to its superiority. From this, both have to be blamed for
being racists since inferiority complex is as racist as superiority complex.

The writers have reflected their ideologies and the ideologies of the time with varied degrees of
similarities and differences. However, they have not explicitly put their ideological convergence
and divergence with the current Ethiopian government. In fact, there are complains of ethnicity
and government intervention as raised by one of the authors, but she has not touched upon the
basic political and economic principles of these days. In case the existing ideology fails
functioning, the first option that some of the authors have put is liberalism.

95
5.2 Recommendations
Above all, the diasporic Ethiopian literature in English is an emerging literature that has the
potential of addressing our political, historical and cultural strengths and weaknesses to the
international community since the texts are written in a global medium of communication, the
English language. However, the political themes of these texts are not critically studied so far.
Therefore, scholars who have a special interest in politics are expected to conduct further studies
on this area.

The first challenge that the researcher faced while conducting this study was the inaccessibility
of the texts themselves. Since the books are published abroad, most of them are not totally
available in Ethiopia while the few are confined to a single organization, which is selling them
very expensively. Thus, the Ethiopian writer’s Association is also expected to make these works
easily accessible to readers and researchers. Moreover, Ethiopian higher learning institutions are
also expected to provide the texts to their students.

Because of its sensitiveness, dealing with politics from afar results in misleading others and
frustrating the self. What is gathered from hearsay and books cannot be as valid as what is
practically observed and experienced. Hence, using secondary source to construct an ideology is
very dangerous. Because of lack of strong foundation, the fate of the ideology is a final collapse;
but it destructs much before its collapse. Hence, to formulate strong and widely accepted
ideologies, the diasporic Ethiopian writers need to practically observe and experience both the
good and the bad political situations of their country.

Basically, these books are written for readers. As the writers wrote their books with purpose,
readers should also read them with purpose. In this case, there are some ideologies that are
constructed from a distance; some are also directly adopted without contextualization; some are
still adopted with little modification. Thus, readers are encouraged to investigate the political
philosophy behind the ideologies that are reflected in the texts at hand.

The last but still important point is that the current Ethiopian government should make use of
those emerging alternative ideologies, especially liberalism, which is both explicitly and
implicitly suggested as a way forward to the betterment of the Ethiopian politics.

96
 References

I. Primary Sources

Hama Tuma. (2004). Give Me a Dog’s Life Any Day: African Absurdies II. Canadan: Trafford Publishing.

Maaza Mengiste. (2010). Beneath the Lion’s Gaze. New York: W.W Norton & Company Ltd.

Nega Mezlekia. (2000). Notes from the Hyena’s Belly. Toronto: Penguin.

Rebecca G. Haile. (2007). Held at a Distance: My Discovery of Ethiopia. Chicago: Academy Chicago
Publishers.

II. Secondary Sources

Adams, I. and Dyson, W. R. (2007). Fifty Major Political Thinkers. London: Routledge.
Ali G. Ghalib. (2006). Ethiopia from a Century of Obscurity to Dawn of Democracy.Addis
Ababa: Berhanena Selam Printing Enterprise .
Bikkenin, N.B. (1980). Socialist Ideology. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Bird, Colin. (2006). An Introduction to Political Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Cahn, M. Steven. (ed.). (2003). Philosophy for the 21st Century: A comprehensive Reader. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Childs, P. and Fowler, R. (2006). The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms. London and New
York: Routledge.
Collin, H.P. (2004). Dictionary of Politics and Government (3rded.). London: Bloomsbury
Publishing Pcl.

Curtis, Andy. (2005). “Nationalism in the Diaspora: A Study of the Kurdish Movement”.
Unpublished MA thesis, Department of Literature, University of Utrecht.
Eagleton, Terry. (2002). Marxism and Literary Criticism. London: Routledge.
Endalkachew Hailu. (2008). “The Predicament of the Diaspora as Reflected in The Texture of
Dreams and The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears”. Unpublished MA Thesis,
Department of Foreign Literature, Addis Ababa University.

Feuer, S. Lewis. (1975). Ideology and the Ideologists. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers.

97
Fisseha Tesfu. (2009). “Ideology in Selected East African Anglophone Novels: A Comparative
Study of Post-Colonial Experience”. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Department of Foreign
Literature, Addis Ababa University.

Flick, Uwe. (2006). An Introduction to Qualitative Research. London: Sage Publications.

Frust, R. Lilian. (ed.) (1992). Realism. London and NewYork: Longman.

Gill, Peter. (2010). Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid. New York: Oxford
University Press Inc.
Given, M. Lisa. (2008). The Sage Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods. Sage: Les
Angeles.
Goodin, R. E and Pettit, P. (1997). Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, Ltd.
Guillen, Claudio. (1993). The Challenge of Comparative Literature. Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press.
Harmon, W. and Holman, H. (2006). A Handbook of Literature. New Delhi: Parson Education,
Inc.
Hoffman, John. (2007). A Glossary of Political Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ilitskaya, Lenina .(1977). ABC of Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Mosco: Pregress
Publishers.
Leach, Robert. (2002). Political Ideology in Britain. New York: Palgrave.
Lessnoff, Michael. (1990). Social Contract Theory. New York University Press.
Mekuria Bulcha. (2002). The Making of the Oromo Diaspora: A Historical Sociology of Forced
Migration. Minneapolis: Kirk House Publishers.
Mesfin Adinew. (2012). “A Thematic Study of Selected Prose Fictional and Non-Fictional
Writings of Ethiopian Diaspora in English”. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Department of
Foreign Literature, Addis Ababa University.
Miller, David. (2003). Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Moore, N.B. and Bruder, K. (2005). Philosophy: The Power of Ideas. New York: The McGraw-
Hill Companies, Inc.

Ngara, Emmanuel. (1985). Art and Ideology in the African Novel: A Study of the Influence of
Marxism on African Writing. London: Heinnemann.

98
Peikoff, Leonard. (1991). Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: A Meridian
Book.

Quinn, Edward. (2006). A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms. New York: Facts on
Files, Inc.
Robertson, David. (2003). The Routledge Dictionary of Politics. London and New York:
Routledge.
Solomon A. Getahun. (2007). The History of Ethiopian Immigrants and Refugees in America,
1900-2000: Patterns of Migration, Survival, and Adjustment. New York: LFB Scholarly
Publishing LLC.
Therborn, Goran. (1980). The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. London: Verso
Editions and NLB.
Tyson, Lois. (2006). Critical Theory Today. London and New York: Routledge.
Vestal, M. Theodore. (1999). Ethiopia: A Post-Cold War African State. London: Westport,
Connecticut.

Walelign Emiru. (2008). Ethiopia Through the Second Millenium: Critical Assessment. Addis
Ababa: Ethio Tikur Abay Printing Press.

99
 Declaration

I, the undersigned, declare that this thesis is my work and that all sources of material used in
writing it have been duly acknowledged.

Name: __________________________________

Signature: ________________

Place: _____________________________________

Date of Submission: ___________________________