Modernist Art in Ethiopia

MODERNIST ART IN ETHIOPIA

NEW AFRICAN HISTORIES

SERIES EDITORS: JEAN ALLMAN, ALLEN ISAACMAN, AND DEREK R. PETERSON

David William Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, The Risks of Knowledge

Belinda Bozzoli, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid

Gary Kynoch, We Are Fighting the World

Stephanie Newell, The Forger’s Tale

Jacob A. Tropp, Natures of Colonial Change

Jan Bender Shetler, Imagining Serengeti

Cheikh Anta Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad

Marc Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa?

Marissa J. Moorman, Intonations

Karen E. Flint, Healing Traditions

Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola, editors, Recasting the Past

Moses E. Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown

Emily S. Burrill, Richard L. Roberts, and Elizabeth Thornberry, editors, Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa

Daniel R. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets

Emily Lynn Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here

Robert Trent Vinson, The Americans Are Coming!

James R. Brennan, Taifa

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

David M. Gordon, Invisible Agents

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

Stephanie Newell, The Power to Name

Gibril R. Cole, The Krio of West Africa

Matthew M. Heaton, Black Skin, White Coats

Meredith Terretta, Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence

Paolo Israel, In Step with the Times

Michelle R. Moyd, Violent Intermediaries

Abosede A. George, Making Modern Girls

Alicia C. Decker, In Idi Amin’s Shadow

Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Conjugal Rights

Shobana Shankar, Who Shall Enter Paradise?

Emily S. Burrill, States of Marriage

Todd Cleveland, Diamonds in the Rough

Carina E. Ray, Crossing the Color Line

Sarah Van Beurden, Authentically African

Giacomo Macola, The Gun in Central Africa

Lynn Schler, Nation on Board

Julie MacArthur, Cartography and the Political Imagination

Abou B. Bamba, African Miracle, African Mirage

Daniel Magaziner, The Art of Life in South Africa

Paul Ocobock, An Uncertain Age

Keren Weitzberg, We Do Not Have Borders

Nuno Domingos, Football and Colonialism

Jeffrey S. Ahlman, Living with Nkrumahism

Bianca Murillo, Market Encounters

Thomas F. McDow, Buying Time

Jon Soske, Internal Frontiers

Laura Fair, Reel Pleasures

Elizabeth W. Giorgis, Modernist Art in Ethiopia

MODERNIST ART IN ETHIOPIA

ELIZABETH W. GIORGIS

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

ATHENS

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Giorgis, Elizabeth W., author.

Title: Modernist art in Ethiopia / Elizabeth W. Giorgis.

Other titles: New African histories series.

Description: Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, 2019. | Series: New African histories | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018045761| ISBN 9780821423462 (hc : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780821423479 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780821446539 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Modernism (Art)--Ethiopia. | Art, Ethiopian--20th century. | Art, Ethiopian--21st century. | Art--Political aspects--Ethiopia.

Classification: LCC N7386 .G56 2019 | DDC 709.630904--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045761

In memory of my brother Getinet Wolde Giorgis.

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

Please tell me bird about his last gasp

You who flew to the downcast dusk

Of a place called Oklahoma, how did it sound?

Trampled with morning chills and struck with gravels of snow

That foreign land

Where the shuttered light of loneliness bemoaned

Uttered words of closure avowed

Please tell me bird about his last gasp

When the shades and hues of Ethiopia shattered

How did it sound?

The conclusion ker’arayso Gebre

No proxy can come to compensate

But how was it?

Aye! when a dream got swindled

In Oklahoma a foreign land

Your paintbrush is a torching flame

You blazed Gebre

But I don’t know if you have died

Excerpt from Metne Ya Gedegeda (Translation mine)

A tribute to the painter and poet Gebre Kristos Desta, who died in Oklahoma in 1981, by the poet and playwright Tsegaye Gebremedhin. (This powerful poem is hard to translate literally. I simply conveyed the general feeling of the poem.)

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: Early to Mid-twentieth-century Modernism (1900–1957) and the Formation of the Fine Art School

Chapter 2: Intellectual Thought of the 1960s

The Prime of Ethiopian Modernism

Chapter 3: The Modernists of the 1960s

Gebre Kristos Desta and Skunder Boghossian and Their Students

Chapter 4: Enat Hager Weym Mot (Revolutionary Motherland or Death)

Art during the Derg, 1974–91

Chapter 5: Contemporary Ethiopian Art

1995–2015

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1a and b. Advertisements for a car and cognac in the newspaper Berhanena Selam

1.2. Belachew Yimer, Battle of Adwa

1.3. Agegenhu Engida, Self-Portrait

1.4. Emaelaf Hiruy, Shemaglew

3.1. Gebre Kristos Desta, Golgotha

3.2. Gebre Kristos Desta, Self-Portrait

3.3. Gebre Kristos Desta, Green Abstract

3.4. Gebre Kristos Desta, Remembering Marga

3.5. Gebre Kristos Desta, In the Third World

3.6. Gebre Kristos Desta, In the Grotto

3.7. Skunder Boghossian, The Nourishers Series

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

3.9. Henok Melkamzer, Ethiopian zodiac

3.10. Henok Melkamzer, detail of Figure 3.9

3.11. Skunder Boghossian, Untitled

3.12. Skunder Boghossian, Time Cycle III

3.13. Skunder Boghossian, Inferno at Axum

3.14. Zerihun Yetimgeta, Wax and Gold

3.15. Desta Hagos, The Stage

4.1. Afework Tekle, Mother Ethiopia

4.2. Eshetu Tiruneh, Rehab Yefetaw

4.3. Gebre Kristos Desta, Untitled

4.4. Bekele Haile, Ethiopia be Yekatit 66

4.5. Esseye Gebremedhin, Untitled

4.6. Mengesha Seuym, Enamert

4.7. Tsige Sheferaw, Untitled

4.8. Tebebe Dessie, Untitled

4.9. Abebe Kassaye, Untitled

4.10. Esseye Gebremedhin, Women Marching

4.11. Elizabeth Habtewold, Wehemia

4.12. Haregwa Zeru, Addis Ababa

4.13. Daniel Taye, Ferd

4.14. Felege Selam Demissie, Kalkidan

4.15. Leoul Sahle Mariam, Beshah Haile

4.16. Samuel Sharew. Dil ke bahr mado

4.17. Kebedech Tekleab, The River in Rwanda

4.18. Bisrat Shebabaw, Enat meret damena

5.1. Behailu Bezabih, L’Arc de Triomphe

5.2. Bekele Mekonnen, Our Time

5.3. Mulugeta Gebrekidan, Performance for the Wax and Gold Project

5.4. Bekele Mekonnen, Enkokelesh

5.5. Bekele Mekonnen, Oromiya Martyr’s Monument

5.6. Michael Tsegaye, Future Memories VII

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

5.8. Berhanu Ashagrie, Space, Place, Displacement

5.9. Berhanu Ashagrie, Friendship in Time and Space

5.10. Eyob Kitaba, Afalgugne

5.11. Dawit Abebe, Jerba

5.12. Bisrat Shebabaw, Untitled

5.13. Mihret Kebede, The Red Diary

5.14a and b. Helen Zeru, Memory Back and Forth

PREFACE

For six years, I served as the director of the most prominent archive of Ethiopia, the Institute of Ethiopian Studies (IES) at Addis Ababa University. If history is selectively produced and silenced in the analytic content of archival production, this is nowhere more pronounced than in the IES’s archival space. Some of the urgent questions that I broach in this book were conceived in this same archival space, where the time of a discriminating past emerged in the difficulties and constraints of the present. Fortunately, and all at once woefully, my intimate experiences with this particular archive and the bodies of knowledge that it produced and suppressed spurred my curiosity, and I pedantically read the voices behind the politics of silence. I have used the fundamental analytical questions underlying the archive’s selective inclusions and exclusions to come up with what we might call a theory of Ethiopian modernity and modernism.

The orthodoxies that shape the studies of Ethiopia—its culture, history, and aesthetic imagining—call attention to the categories that conjure the images of the country and, most importantly, the extent to which these studies, as fields of study, have undermined the intellectual philosophies that shaped African American, African, and West Indian strands of thought. This exceptionalist perspective, in some of its central positions, has subsequently reduced the significance of the colonial myth and ideology. Furthermore, in a fundamentally hegemonic body of knowledge, it has fostered an implicit, twofold assumption in its definition of Ethiopia. The first is a superior northern and Semitic imagination of Ethiopia. The second is the non-Semitic variety that the field of study persists in constructing as an inferior antithesis, and its vast body of knowledge continues to be absent in the writings of history.

In one of the few works that significantly depart from the official narratives of the studies of Ethiopia, historian Fikru Negash Gebrekidan examined the relationship of Ethiopian studies to black studies to insightfully explore what he called the three traditions:¹ Semitic Orientalism, Marxism, and black studies. In Ethiopia in Black Studies from W. E. B. Du Bois to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Fikru wrote about Du Bois’s understanding of the Ethiopian past, a subject that Du Bois examined in his 1915 publication entitled The Negro. According to Fikru, Du Bois, who had long remained anathema² to conventional Ethiopianists and whose thesis has persisted in the fringes of Ethiopian Studies,³ has always frustrated Semitic Orientalism.

Certainly, for the Semitic Orientalists, Ethiopia is what anthropologist Donald Levine called an outpost of Semitic civilization,⁴ in which the Judeo-Christian legacies purportedly made the country’s history exceptional and matchless in comparison to the rest of the African continent. For Marxists who reached political maturity in the 1960s, Ethiopia was encumbered by a feudal class structure, and in this regard, Marxist activists claimed the Ethiopian experience was unlike other African encounters. They called for a peasant-led agrarian revolution, which culminated in the mass uprising of 1974 that ousted the monarchy. For advocates of black studies, Ethiopia had historically been symbolic of racial redemption and pride. The country’s unique colonial history—Ethiopia was not colonized but only occupied by Italy from 1936 to 1941—and its rich history dating back to the Axumite civilization have shaped potent imagery of Ethiopia in black consciousness.

For Fikru, the Marxists and the Orientalists shared an insular statist historiography in which the maritime exploits of Axum and its Judeo-Christian legacies were celebrated as the hallmark of Ethiopian exceptionalism.⁵ He argued that such an established knowledge base with its exceptionalist viewpoint was contested in black studies—which Du Bois pioneered—where the convergent historiography [of] Axumite, Nubian, and Egyptian civilizations were interlaced together in a broader Nile valley narrative.⁶

In this book, I hope to destabilize the normative prototypes of an Ethiopian humanist knowledge that rejects such continental agency in its knowledge base. And in a modest attempt to generate an alternative thesis on Ethiopian modernity and modernism, I also shed new light on the colonial legacy that noncolonized Ethiopia also shares but that the dogmas framing the studies of Ethiopia cast aside.

Still, my critical evaluation of the factual, informative, and analytical perspectives of Ethiopian humanist knowledge would not be complete if I failed to consider Ethiopian exceptionalism’s masculine readings of knowledge and history. In this regard, my encounters with colleagues as a female academic leader shaped the ways in which I have examined the sociocultural and historical features that informed Ethiopian modernism. I was the first female director of the IES, succeeding several well-regarded academics—historians, anthropologists, and linguists. Challenges of respect and confidence, whether on the part of male colleagues, subordinates, or female colleagues, were experiences I could not isolate from the disciplinary prejudices that the study of Ethiopia informs. On the one hand, my experiences demonstrated to me the difficulties Ethiopian women academics face in the gendered subtext of a masculine norm. On the other hand, they prompted me to urgently initiate a parallel exchange in the ways we research, teach, and mediate the broader geographies and politics of knowledge that are constrained by structural frameworks that systematically silence one history, of which women are important constituents, while privileging another.

Exclusion is, of course, a polygonal phenomenon, but the gender lens illuminates the insidious workings and interrelated nature of systemic social exclusion. This is especially significant because many Ethiopian male academics who are embroiled in masculinist, empiricist, and Semitic-centered theories still find it inconceivable that a woman scholar can actually critically apprehend her objects of study. The very fact that I am part of the social history of Ethiopia but also, as a woman, completely erased from the dominant body of knowledge gives this book its distinct flavor.

It is my hope that this book and others like it will contribute new and insightful lexicons to the social, intellectual, and aesthetic studies of Ethiopia.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book brings together several disciplines. Certainly, its multicolored authorial understanding has benefited from the expert advice and guidance of many people, without whom this volume would not have been possible. Susan Buck-Morss, Iftikhar Dadi, and Salah Hassan all gave me invaluable insights that were tremendously helpful in developing this work. I am especially indebted to my mentor and friend Professor Salah Hassan for his encouragement and belief in me. His unfailing support has been there since the early 1990s when I started to write about Ethiopian art. I cannot thank him enough for his friendship, trust, and encouragement. Professor Iftikhar Dadi read the manuscript in its early stages, and I am grateful for his valuable comments, which have shaped the final outcome of the book.

I am exceptionally indebted to Professor Andreas Eshete, former president of Addis Ababa University, for taking me back to the country where I was born, for trusting my intellectual rigor in times of adversity, and for showing me what a good human being a scholar should be. Andreas, you have been my brother, my mentor, and my friend, and I am thankful for all that you have taught me. Your unreserved trust in my academic work continues to completely disarm me. I am grateful as well to the late Dr. Yonas Admassu, who taught me all I know about Ethiopian literature; I miss his advice and all the petulance that was so charmingly woven in with the love he showed me. I wish to also thank my dearest brother and friend Professor Dagmawi Woubshet, who greeted me with a bottle of champagne after I defended my dissertation at Cornell and has been with me ever since. He read the manuscript with the same love and respect that he has unconditionally given me through the years—and, of course, with the graceful repertoires of comments that I have enthusiastically incorporated. Dagi, you are indeed the perfect blend of knowledge and humanity. My thanks to Konjit Seyum—the founder of Asni Gallery, the first contemporary art gallery in Ethiopia—for opening her world of artists when I returned to my homeland after a twenty-seven-year absence.

Many people on the faculty and staff of Addis Ababa University assisted and encouraged me in various ways during the course of writing this book. My research would not have been possible without the special support of the staff of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies. I am thankful for having received much assistance from the librarians of this esteemed institution, where I was fortunate enough to serve as director through much of my research. My appreciation particularly goes to Messay Yohannes, Genet Getaneh, and Eyob Alemayehu for routinely responding to my inquiries. I would also like to thank the faculty and staff of the Skunder Boghossian College of Performing and Visual Arts for assisting me in different capacities, especially Tsigereda Tadele, the managing director of the college, for providing support for all my research needs.

My gratitude is also extended to Semeneh Ayalew, Netsanet Gebremichael, Shimelis Bonsa, and Surafel Wondimu, young, upcoming, and cutting-edge scholars of whom I am enormously proud: they will undoubtedly change the course of Ethiopian academic inquiry. They were my source of hope and inspiration as I researched this book, and their work in offering precious feedback was a labor of love that I sincerely appreciate. I also thank Kenedeneh Enedeg from the IES for his useful comments on the liturgies of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Professor Finbarr Barry Flood read my manuscript despite his busy schedule, and I thank him for providing input that was extremely useful. It would have been impossible for me to decode the specific periods of artistic modernism without the assistance of my friends and colleagues Bekele Mekonnen, Behailu Bezabih, Berhanu Ashagrie, and Geta Mekonnen. Not only did they give me choice suggestions on archives, but they also applied their artistic acumen to the images I examined, all of which ultimately sharpened the body of thought I have conveyed. I would also like to thank the following artists for candidly sharing their experiences with me: Desta Hagos, Zerihun Yetimgeta, Abdelrahman Sheriff, Esseye Gebremedhin, Tadesse Mesfin, Bisrat Shebabaw, Elizabeth Habtewold, Robel Temesgen, Eyob Kitaba, Mihret Kebede, and Helen Zeru. Without their precious observations and aesthetic judgments, this book would not have materialized. Gashe Abate Mekuria, the great playwright of modern Ethiopian theater who passed away in 2016, greatly contributed to the key assumptions I made about the artists and intellectuals of the 1960s. His charm and sophistication were captivating, and I am extremely privileged to have worked with him for a few years. My close acquaintance with the late Skunder Boghossian, Tsegaye Gebremedhin, and Solomon Deressa was significant to my entry into the art and literary world and to the formation of this book. I am extremely indebted to the knowledge that I have received from these phenomenal individuals, each of whom has left an indelible mark on Ethiopian intellectual thought and modernism. I am also grateful to Kebedech Tekleab for the friendship she offered when I was trying to find my way into the art world during the 1990s.

I was tremendously fortunate to be helped by the staff of the National Museum of Ethiopia and particularly its curators, Girma Bulti and Fitsum Teferra. My appreciation also goes to Daniel Worku, who assisted in organizing the images, and to Fiona McKinnon, who proofread the text. Agazit Abate was kind enough to organize the final text, and my appreciation goes out to her as well.

I am immensely indebted to two beautiful friends who anchored me throughout this project: Meaza Birru and Ethiopia Tadesse. Ethiopieye, you were a true comrade when I felt discouraged, and I thank you for the unreserved love and encouragement that you have given me. And Maeziye, I could not have made it in Ethiopia if it had not been for you. Your overwhelming generosity, unwavering trust, and solid advice have taught me patience and courage. It is through you and my involvement with the Sheger 102.1 radio programs, as well as the station’s rich archive that you single-handedly built, that I was able to fully comprehend the intellectual movements of different periods. And it is also through you that I was able to withstand all the gender-biased stereotypes that challenged me throughout my academic career in Ethiopia. My sincere appreciation goes to you for being the woman you are, resilient and honorable. I have learned much from you about womanhood in a country that is so mercilessly misogynist, and I thank you for that.

Finally, nobody has been more important to me in the pursuit of my graduate studies than my brother Getinet Wolde Giorgis, who passed away in 2011. He was my enduring source of strength throughout the frustration and loneliness that accompanied my decision to go to graduate school in midlife after a lucrative career in banking and finance. Despite his illness, he helped me overcome many setbacks and stay focused on my graduate study, and he was a constant source of love and concern. He would have been extremely happy to see this book come to fruition—and I dedicate it to him.

Elizabeth W. Giorgis Addis Ababa

INTRODUCTION

IN MARCH 1999, I walked into Skunder Boghossian’s apartment to be greeted by an old and bulky bedspring lying in the middle of the living room floor. I had met Skunder in 1996, and by then, I was familiar with seeing strange and abstruse objects in his home, which he also used as a working studio space. This particular object, however, was perplexing in its physical type. A friend, he said, had dropped it off for him. Live and let live was a motto he often repeated. It was part of my initiation into Skunder’s world, a form of good manners, to understand that I was not to discuss these peculiar objects or ask about their purpose.

Skunder was commissioned to do the Wall of Representation, a mural for the Ethiopian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and I used to travel every weekend from my home in New Jersey to assist him with the project. Nothing was customary with Skunder, even the friends who delivered shreds, odds and ends, ruins, and scraps to his studio. It was amazing that so many people thought of him when they saw the queer and the anomalous and considered such things a bounty for their friend. The truth is that, by 1999, I had also become this type of friend. The regulation and uniformity of my world, so closely related to my former career in banking and finance, had been disrupted by the furiousness of Skunder’s place. I found that I had begun to relish the beauty of wreckage.

In the beginning of our friendship, I was bewildered by the objects and the disarray, which was truly extraordinary—intense but also unexpected. The futon sleeper, tilted and damaged, was always covered with a board that was only removed when a guest required a seat; the chair was frequently concealed by painting accessories; the table was enveloped in canvases. And, of course, the bed was comfortably occupied by Cali the cat. Newspapers, plastic bags, wood scraps, and other odd items had long since taken over the floor, and my early attempts to organize the space only elicited Skunder’s fury. Nor was he amused by indifference to his clutter; rather, he demanded absolute and complete sensitivity to it. His was a space without restraint where furniture and equipment were equally functional, their ultimate endurance and performativity accidental rather than deliberate. They became part of the clutter, anticipating their fate—to be destroyed, molded, and then reborn (or not)—sometimes after several years of waiting to no avail.

The finished paintings always dominated. Impeccable and overwhelmingly attractive, the paintings conveyed sheer pleasure amid the bewildering commotion. On a typical day at Skunder’s, atypical as every day always was, the clutter, the paintings, the cat, the music, and his loud voice somehow harmonized and resonated with the visitor. The music was almost always jazz; as his friend Solomon Deressa said, Jazz, the supreme creation of a people in exile, opened Skunder to his own experiences of exile.¹ And so, I learned to accept this paradox of normality and even to appreciate the genius of this state of disorder and its perfect harmony in the midst of pandemonium.

*   *   *

The bedspring was intriguing, and I was certain that it would inspire one of Skunder’s amazing designs. What had felt like anxiety when I was first introduced to his language of objects—their secrets, innocence, or duplicity—had in time become excitement, and I remember agreeing with him on the bedspring’s delicate yet robust beauty. By then, I had grown accustomed to the enigmatic nature of visual elicitations. Through my friendship with him, I came to realize that, as had happened in our shared country’s history, texture and time cooperate in evoking specific forms and entities out of a world of muddles. And everything in that room of his had a purpose—perhaps not as yet obvious but nonetheless a fate. His obsession with creating from wreckage had stimulated my mind. I knew in March 1999, with a bedspring as a source of inspiration, that I would write about shapes that had already emerged or were in the process of emerging. When and how I did not know, but I understood that I would not remain the same predictable and conventional person I had been and that I would someday understand forms and expose new ones that were there all along—in textures, compositions, and relationships. Fifteen years after Skunder’s death, the most vivid memories of his home come to mind, particularly his fascination with things that witness their time.² And so, in this book, I make an attempt to appreciate the forms and textures of an Ethiopian aesthetic by simultaneously unraveling the temporal potency of its space.

*   *   *

Skunder Boghossian, who is widely believed to be one of the founders of Ethiopian modernism, studied art in Paris from 1957 to 1966 at the height of the movement for African liberation and independence and its politicized philosophy. If the artist’s craft was of particular importance, deconstructing the boundaries of European modernism that codified theories of images, shapes, and movements was equally critical for Skunder, as works of art outside the West were considered either primitive or lacking in and mimetic of a discriminatory modern European universal. Inspired by decolonization’s landscape of optimism, Skunder reexamined and unpacked conventional narratives of European modernism to generate his own articulation of African modernism. By appropriating European aesthetic strategies and juxtaposing his own images, he progressively contested the political, cultural, and intellectual praxis of the Western art market, as well as the academy that had framed the legitimacy of modern African art while often hindering its recognition. As African art historian Salah Hassan has indicated, early modernists such as Skunder revealed the plurality of modernity, even in its European context, and the realization that there are other modernisms beyond the European context.³

With its political and aesthetic magnitude, Skunder’s extraordinary imagination calls readers’ attention to the relations or differences between early African modernists who rose to subvert modernism’s colonial hierarchy and countless Ethiopian modernists (many of whom are considered in this book) who emerged from a very different history. Certainly, Skunder was first artistically noteworthy in addressing the historical, cultural, and intellectual crises of colonial subjectivity during the early years of resistance against colonialism. But his visual contributions that laid bare the critical association between the ideologies of colonialism and the politics of decolonization were neither conceived nor developed in Ethiopia’s modernism history. One could easily attribute this to the country’s unique colonial history.

Indeed, it is impossible to fully appreciate the conditions of Ethiopian artistic modernism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries without considering the political and cultural implications of colonialism and the politics of decolonization. Whether Ethiopia was colonized or not, emphasis should be placed on the power relations between Ethiopia and the West—a relationship of margin to center that was hardly free of colonial influence or domination. And yet, the profound cultural, political, and discursive exigencies of Western imperial hegemony occupy a paradoxical space that is neither intimate nor remote in Ethiopia’s artistic and intellectual history. That most scholars and artists have unapologetically expressed deeply ingrained feelings of exclusivity by no means simplifies the question, fostering parallels between Ethiopia and the rest of colonized Africa while ultimately abstracting any sense of commonality with the colonial experience.

That said, my fundamental thesis is the following: Ethiopian modernity and modernism are constitutive of the larger political and ideological history of modernity. And as Walter Mignolo indicated, Coloniality . . . is constitutive of modernity—there is no modernity without coloniality.⁴ When we think along Mignolo’s lines, coloniality is the stability of colonial practices embedded in the project of modernity through which Western ideas and ideals are ingrained in the non-West. Perhaps a quote from Samir Amin, one of coloniality’s early evaluators, is also appropriate: The European West is not only the world of material wealth and power, including military might, it is also the site of the triumph of the scientific spirit, rationality and practical efficiency, just as it is the world of tolerance, diversity of opinions, respect for human rights and democracy.⁵ In this case, the West is the best of the world⁶ and the non-West its antithesis. Hence, what I persistently raise in this book are the critical questions of coloniality that a few artists such as Skunder crucially understood, unlike many others I cover here, and how the central issues of coloniality were translated, transformed, and adapted in the making of Ethiopian modernism and modernity. In an ironic way, noncolonized Ethiopia offers a very interesting comparative cultural space to explore the alterity of the colonized, affording a fascinating sociocultural context for the phenomenon of modernism. Indeed, noncolonized Ethiopia’s woven texture of culture and politics raises doubts about the possibility of any simplistic comparison (however constructed) between the modern and the premodern; between the colonized, the noncolonized, and the postcolonized; or, even more urgently in this case, between the modern and the noncolonized.

At one level, the modern history of Ethiopia (1900 to the present) is exclusively sheltered in what Richard Iton called the language game . . . that allows few possibilities for agency, autonomy or substantive negotiation.⁷ I am obviously talking about the accolades, the praise, and the romance of Ethiopia that historically invigorated the sensibilities of black consciousness for Africans in the continent and the wider diaspora. The expansiveness of Ethiopia’s time line, which dates back to the civilization of Axum in the fourth century AD,⁸ its millennia-old manuscripts, monuments, and texts, and its sovereign polity have not only complicated Western images of black people but also caused Ethiopia to be imagined as a living symbol of freedom for Africans in the continent and the diaspora. The Battle of Adwa in 1896, where Emperor Menelik II (1844–1913) defeated Italian colonial aggression, had galvanized this image all the more among Africans living under colonial rule, since Ethiopia defeated a European colonial power and thereby exposed the myth that white armies in Africa were unassailable.

But at another level, leaders had little inclination to connect with the black imagination. They were more interested in garnering tributes than in fostering a productive relationship with black politics, since they saw Ethiopia as a chosen nation. Up until the revolution of 1974, which ousted the monarchy,⁹ citizens were urged to believe that monarchs originated from a divine genealogy—going back to Menelik I, the son of King Solomon of Israel and Queen Sheba of Ethiopia—and to trust that Ethiopia was a chosen nation and, as such, was unlike the rest of the African continent.

What is ultimately ironic is not so much Ethiopia’s indifference to the black imagination but the textures of the indigence that has eclipsed the country in the twenty-first century and that, more ironic still, muffled Ethiopia’s name in black politics and imaginary. In a special issue on Ethiopian literature, art, and culture, the editors of Callaloo beautifully expressed the quandaries, the ironies, and the deferred dreams of this land called Ethiopia:

The voices and images of modern Ethiopia speak to each other and to the world. In ways that very few societies can, modern Ethiopians have seen the world through a multi-colored stained glass. They look back to a time when theirs was one of the richest and most powerful in the world, and have seen it too as one of the poorest and least understood. They speak of both pride and struggle, conquest and famine, nationalism and intense division, loss and longing: what better set of voices to articulate what it means to be human in the world.¹⁰

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

In the face of this repressive quandary, it was the Ethiopians, my colleagues at the IES, who should have provided comfort to these people. They should have told them that the situation was not so grievous as it appeared and that they would come together with their African American colleagues to give Ethiopia’s present condition meaning. But the arrogance of history had made most of my colleagues indifferent. Instead of reaching out, they looked at the African Americans as anomalies: after all, they were descendants of slaves that they so tragically patronized. As this and similar experiences reveal, the romance of Ethiopia has yet to address the fundamental terms of our present disorder—the hypothesis, logic, and predicament of the coloniality of our noncolonized land.

My position in relation to the present study, such as my formative years and academic training in the United States, where the structural problems of coloniality and race are persistently deliberated, may have prejudiced my perception, since my central argument in this book is focused on systems of colonial domination and exploitation—systems that, I argue, the core area of Ethiopian academic inquiry has broadly failed to interrogate. The glaring omissions of such knowledge in this academic inquiry and in the wider intellectual thought inevitably demonstrate the extent of anticolonial thinking in historical knowledge. It is precisely this disjuncture that, in fact, characterizes Ethiopian modernity and modernism, accounting for the peculiarity of the various intellectual and artistic currents that I cover. And my primary and central concern is this disregard of colonial epistemes by Ethiopian historians and intellectuals and the historiographical implication that this has produced.

It was six years after I returned to Ethiopia when I welcomed my African American colleagues to the country of my birth. I felt their disappointment and pain then, but my hope had not yet been stifled. Seven years later, I feel much more acrimonious because I still have not found the intellectual joy that fully understands the meaning of subalternity in