The idea of global Ethiopia is an architectural narrative scheme to unpack Ethiopia and the global intellectual and cultural movement it has inspired. Through systematic exploration of ancient mythologies, historical records, biblical verses and contemporary events, the various strands of Ethiopia are woven into a narrative. The narrative is entitled the idea of global Ethiopia. It is global because the idea is extracted, reconfigured and synthesized from sources that cover Africa, Europe and the Americas.  Its time dimension is long, extending from the ancient to the contemporary period.

The idea of global Ethiopia or what I call Ethiopiology, or the global study of Ethiopia, is a reference to an intellectual and cultural history and tradition among Africans and the African Diaspora as well as white Europeans, particularly since the medieval period.

Ethiopia emerges in world history through the teachings and writings of both Ethiopians and non-Ethiopians.  From Hebrew people’s Old Testament to the Greek version of the Bible, vivid references were made about Ethiopia, a land of famed ancient people.  Ancient Egyptian records as early as early as the first dynasty, some 5,000 years ago, include references to myrrh, incense(itan) and, more importantly dinq, who were taken to Egypt from the land of the Punt.  These terms and the materials are present in the Horn of Africa.  Roman, Arabic and Ge’ez sources further solidify and propagate the mythology and history of Ethiopia.

Ethiopia, in terms of place and time, expanded and contracted through the ages and since the fourth century of the Common Era, the name is exclusively associated with present-day Ethiopia.

With regard to people of Africa and the African Diaspora, the idea is linked to resistance against enslavement and colonialism and for the establishment of independent religious and cultural institutions in more than one continent.  To Christian Europeans, Ethiopia was the land of the legendary priest king, Prester John.  Europeans sought his alliance in their attempt to recapture Jerusalem from expanding Islamic forces.

The purpose of this paper is to excavate and narrate the various strands of the idea of Ethiopia through an interdisciplinary approach and interpretation.

The idea of global Ethiopia is rooted in the verses of the Bible. Attraction to specific verses first took place in the fourth century of the Common Era in Aksum, Ethiopia.  Aksumites in the process of translating the Bible from Greek to Ge’ez came across the word Ethiopia.  They appropriated the name and exclusively used it to rename their country.

The second attraction to specific verses took place in the contemporary period in the eighteenth century, perhaps earlier, in the African Diaspora when old time preachers turned them to what James Weldon Johnson calls to ‘bold and unfettered imagination’. James Weldon Johnson notes that “the earliest of the [old time] preachers must have virtually committed many parts of the Bible to memory through hearing the scriptures read or preached from in the white churches which the [enslaved Africans] attended. They were the first of the enslaved Africans to learn to read, and their reading was confined to the Bible, and specifically to the more dramatic passages of the Old Testament.” Verses that mention Ethiopia has inspired millions of enslaved Africans to ‘keep freedom in their hearts every day of their lives’ and to determinedly strive to live free.

It can be argued that the idea of Global Ethiopia was designed to serve as a frame of reference for theoretical and practical efforts in Black consciousness movements.  The thinkers, including 18^th century African American preachers, were striving to define and delineate the imaginary and real boundaries of the African Diaspora. The preachers belong primarily to the ‘Black Church,’ “which refers generally to organized Christian religious institutions to which African Americans have been attached since slavery.” What James Weldon Johnson identifies as “the old-time Negro preacher” was an important figure and a vital factor in the formulation of the idea. James Weldon Johnson further recognizes the old time preacher as a builder who brought about the establishment of independent places of worship.  In so doing, he provided “the first sphere in which race leadership might develop and function.”

The Ethiopia of the Bible or Classical sources inspired thinkers to imagine their freedom and struggle for autonomous cultural viability. The idea of Ethiopia has served as an anchor to handle ‘local’ political and cultural problems.The idea is embraced because it promises to relocate the enslaved and colonized outside of the colonizer’s matrix, in the sphere of human freedom, possibility and opportunity. African Diaspora thinkers verbalized the idea in a language of resistance and invention with the deliberate intent of challenging the falsification and silencing of their African past and distortion of their cultural integrity, particularly by European colonial forces of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the Common Era.  Furthermore,

“Pioneering Ethiopianists used ‘the Idea of Ethiopia’ as a psychological tool to survive the inhumanity of enslavement.”

They were able to develop a strategy to counter the notion of white supremacy.  The essence of the idea might have been captured best by the following definition of Fikru Gebre Kidan.  According to Fikru, “It is a set of ideas or beliefs based on the reading of selected scriptural texts and western classics, from which was forged a sense of collective historical consciousness.”

The intellectual engagement of the African Diaspora includes the invention of symbolic languages, as Stuart Hall puts it, “to describe and appropriate histories of the African Diaspora.” The theorists, in part, are responsible in fashioning a sense of historical recovery and identity for millions of Africans who were forcibly removed from their homelands and subjected to centuries of human degradation. Caroline Goeser refers to the these preachers/intellectuals as Ethiopianist strategists or practitioners who were engaged in creating a hybrid expression of Black identity based on their ancient past while at the same time participating in contemporary American culture. In other words, the idea of Ethiopia was a story of an intellectual tradition, which is now fully explored as an Africana paradigm in religious institutions and institutions of higher learning throughout the world.

“Pan-Africanism, Rastafari [Movement], La Negritude, Black Power, Black Arts Movement, Afrocentricity, and, [the latest, Black Internationalism] are just some of the revolutionary cultural, spiritual and political offshoots of Ethiopianist philosophy.” The idea is also referred to as Ethiopianism, an idea taken from biblical verses and crystallized into a discourse of freedom. As Leonard Barrett aptly puts it, “from biblical writings through Herodotus to the medieval fantasy with the mythic king Prester John right down to our day, Ethiopia has had a hypnotic influence on history, which has been retained by the imagination of Blacks in Diaspora.” Chirenje also notes that in southern Africa, “self-determination was the hallmark of Ethiopianism.” Reverend Mzimba, a leader of the Presbyterian Church of Africa, who states that “freedom was what Ethiopianism was all about.”

The idea of Ethiopia is a remarkable intellectual project.  The conception of liberation is undertaken by utilizing religious texts.  Historians further explored biblical references, in Arthur Schomburg’s memorable terms, by digging the African past.  Verses are turned into historical narratives of the ancient, medieval and contemporary African past.  Ancient Egypt, Nubia, Aksum or medieval Western Sudan and Zimbabwe, the Swhaili City-States and the Amazigh traditions of North Africa and the colonial resistance of Central Africa, just to mention a few, are relevant themes of historicity of Africa.   The linking of the African past with the history of the African Diaspora was perhaps one of the earliest Pan-African undertakings of old time preachers, historians, and nationalists of the African Diaspora.

One of the foremost authorities with regard to historical and symbolic relevance is William Scott, who meticulously documented and analyzed the relations between Ethiopia and the intellectual history of African Americans.  Scott’s The Sons of Sheba’s Race: African Americans and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935-1941 is a remarkable text that devotes an entire chapter on the ‘Ethiopian Tradition.’  This chapter deals with the historical development and functions of the idea of Ethiopia or Ethiopianism.  Scott vividly articulates the symbolic value of Ethiopia to African American identity formation, racial redemption, and the establishment of independent institutions in conjunction with major historical events in the United States.

Scott states that ‘Ethiopian symbolism in the area of education and scholarship was most pronounced during the pre-Civil war years in the writings of the first African American historians.’ (Scott, p. 18)

Historically the idea may be traced back to the ancient history of Ethiopians, particularly the history of the Nubians from the time period of the 25^th Egyptian Dynasty. The 25^th Egyptian Dynasty had Nubian pharaohs who ruled both Egypt and Nubia for about 88 years.  The Dynasty began with Pharaoh Piankhy (Piye) in 751 BCE and came to an end after Pharaoh Taharqa’s defeat by Assyrians in 663 BCE. The 25^th Dynasty, which is also called an Ethiopian Dynasty, is a subject of Greek and Roman mythologies, arts and other narratives. Several verses in the Bible also refer to the pharaohs of the Dynasty. The biblical sources made, mostly positive references to African people who lived in Egypt and south of ancient Egypt.  The idea later broadened its geographical breadth and historical scope by including the histories of Meroé in the Sudan and Aksum in Ethiopia.

The idea is further extended in time and place when the contemporary history of the present day Ethiopia, particularly the remarkable victory against the Italian colonial invaders at the Battle of Adwa in 1896 and the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1930, and the Italian invasion and occupation of Ethiopia from 1935 to 1941 has expanded its frame of reference and cultural projections. “As [present day] Ethiopia crosses into the new millennium, it continues to be revered as a symbol of Black accomplishment and the ‘promised land’ for uprooted Africans.”

The idea, which is associated, in biblical discourse, to the people known as Kushites, or Nubians whose accomplishments documented in biblical and ancient texts reached the thinkers of the African Diaspora, who, in turn, engaged in the construction of liberation discourse.  The Kushites, by the time their deeds and fame reached the Greeks, their names have been changed to Ethiopians at about third century BCE.

Diaspora intellectuals researched and claimed these ancient sources of information in their pursuit for positive black identity.  These scholars also transformed the information in cascade of thoughts needed to counter bondage and to build the castle of freedom.

(To be continued.)

(Main photo: Painting by contemporary artist depicting the Battle of Adwa on 2nd March 1896, fought against the invading Italians hoping to colonise Ethiopia.)

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