By Messay Kebede
The initial and widespread skepticism surrounding Barack Obama’s presidential ambition was first seriously challenged when he won the democratic race in Iowa. Since then, Obama’s successive victories in many states and his emergence as the leading Democratic candidate have definitively swept away the well-entrenched disbelief that a black person could become a serious candidate. Whatever the final outcome of the Democratic race, the undeniable evidence is that a growing number of white Americans are now ready to accept a black person as their president. This is a mind-blowing progress when we recall that no less than four decades ago blacks were fighting for elementary civil rights.
A word of caution: Obama’s election as U.S. President does not mean that bigotry and racism will vanish from the American society. Many centers of resistance will remain and they will have to be dismantled one by one. But his successful race and eventual election as president establish that he represents a major turning point of the movement that started five decades ago with Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
What made possible this dramatic transformation in a society plagued by centuries of racist crimes and mistreatments? The question has no univocal answer and its complexity will feed on academic controversies for a long time. Yet such controversies cannot fail to agree that the change owes much to the democratic functioning of the American society, notwithstanding its initial severe limitations. The progressive enlargement of democracy is responsible for the steady weakening of racist prejudices and practices. Not only did it give blacks the hope of complete integration, but it also showed the incompatibility of racism with democratic principles to the white majority. In crossing the Rubicon by voting for a black president, a growing number of white Americans assert their resolution to turn the page of America’s racist history.
The message emanating from American society is thus loud enough: no amount of accumulated animosity between people can resist the integrative appeal of a genuine democratic society. If blacks and whites in America can move toward integration despite blacks’ anger over centuries of slavery and racist mistreatments and whites’ racist prejudices, then how much less difficult may it be for peoples in Ethiopia to unite when the animosity separating them never came anywhere near to racial segregationism?
Such thoughts come to mind each time I contrast Obama’s momentum toward victory in the Democratic race with the deepening slide of Ethiopian elites toward ethnic confrontation and separatist ideology. Both ethnonationalist and secessionist ideologies bank on accumulated anger over past exclusions and push the view that, rather than the hope for integration, the right attitude is either to effectively secede or be ready to do so. For such ideologies, the animosity cannot be overcome; there is no place for a speech like “I Have a Dream.” Yet the evolution of American society demonstrates that no exclusion, however deep-seated, can ignore the appeal of genuine democratic institutions. It adds to an earlier and no less significant demonstration when Nelson Mandela’s policy of reconciliation and negotiation dismantled the apartheid legacy and opened the way to a multi-racial democracy.
So one wonders why Ethiopian elites prefer to breakup the country, as did the Eritrean elite fifteen years ago, than to work toward the emergence of a democratic society, which, everybody agrees, is the right antidote to movements of anger against exclusions. Here again, answers are not simple, as many factors contributed to the drift of Ethiopian elites toward ethnonationalism. And this includes the Amhara elite as well, as evidenced by the infection of all the apparatuses of the state with ethnic nepotism during the time of the Derg’s rule even as its official ideology banned any ethnic preference.
What impregnated the American case with positive developments was that King’s speech presupposed and activated the mind of forgiveness for past practices. For Mandela, too, forgiveness, which he characterizes as the “best cultural heritage” of blacks in South Africa, was a prerequisite to effective liberation, for it alone can prepare the ground for a common future. Forgiveness is not given just to comply with the wish of former oppressors; it is first of all sought to free oneself from a state of mind poisoned by anger and hatred. People who let anger take possession of their soul become the prey of dictators, that is, of psychopaths who find their way to power through the fanning of anger. If some readers have doubt about this outcome, I ask them to have a serious look at the Eritrean case. By the way, what is appealing about Obama’s for so many white people is the absence of anger, which beautifully fitted into a call for change.
This is to say that the building of democratic institutions is impossible so long as people exclusively listen to their anger. The proliferation of ethnonationalism and separatist groups in Ethiopia emanates mostly from the mistrust in the democratic potential of Ethiopian society. Mutual suspicion explains the reversal of the democratic process that led to the victory of the CUD. This suspicion has its root in the fact that elites of various ethnic groups only pay attention to their anger. Many Tigreans and elites of other ethnic groups tolerated the repression because of the fear that the control of the state by the CUD means the return of the Amhara rule. Likewise, those who have accumulated anger as a result of the TPLF’s rule cannot achieve their democratic aspiration so long as they are stuck in a revengeful state of mind. All they do is prepare the ground for another dictatorial rule.
It is my firm belief that many Ethiopians have opted for a peaceful form of struggle to achieve the dream of a democratic society. Experience has taught them that armed struggle particularly favors dictators rather than the rule of the people. While this is a huge progress, it will not bear fruit unless the decision to change ourselves by a bold move of forgiveness of all those who have hurt us accompanies the peaceful struggle. We owe this forgiveness to ourselves as the only way to wipe out the soul-eating venom of oppression, whether we belong to Tigrean, Oromo, Amhara, Sidama, Somali, etc., ethnic groups.
That is why the appeal to Ethiopian nationalism is not enough: Ethiopiawinet must be transfigured by an act of forgiveness. For in preserving anger and nurturing a revengeful mind, we only want to reverse the situation by oppressing those who have oppressed us; we do not target the elimination of oppression altogether. Such a goal only confirms that an unconscious identification directs the struggle, that liberation is coined in terms derived from the internalization of the oppressor. Is there a better example of this internalization than the TPLF itself? Many Tigreans joined the TPLF to bring down the Amhara rule; today we see them doing what they used to denounce in their student years.
The solution for oppression cannot come from a reversal; instead, it requires what Paulo Freire called “the pedagogy of the oppressed.” When the oppressed move from revenge to true liberation through forgiveness, they become a force of change. As Freire puts it, “although the situation of oppression is a dehumanized and dehumanizing totality affecting both the oppressors and those whom they oppress, it is the latter who must, from their stifled humanity, wage for both the struggle for a fuller humanity; the oppressor, who is himself dehumanized because he dehumanizes others, is unable to lead this struggle.”
Doubtless, the transformative power of forgiveness would be easy to come by if the present rulers of Ethiopia were convincingly ready to get out of their zero-sum mentality. Since the crackdown on the CUD, I see the accumulation of bad signs in that an increasing number of people seem to be losing hope in a peaceful struggle in Ethiopia. The continuation of a policy of repression and exclusion can only exacerbate the anger and defeat the positive disposition toward a peaceful resolution of contradictions. Some such direction would only bring more destruction and chaos and further uncertainty about the future of the country.
Another important lesson of American elections is how unity matters above all else in political struggles. The rise of Obama revealed a serious risk of split of the Democratic Party along racial lines. It did not happen and is not likely to happen, not because of the contestants, but because ordinary members as well as leaders of the party strongly rejected any divisive line. In any seasoned political party, split among the leadership often occurs, but rarely materializes because of the refusal of members to be drawn into factional power conflicts. In so doing, they exercise their legitimate rights and ensure that individual ambitions do not damage the unity of the party.
Different was the reaction of most supporters of the CUD at the sight of divided leaders. The prevailing tendency was not to refuse to be dragged into the dispute; rather, it was to take side for one of the factions, thereby adding fuel to the dispute. As a result, the CUD has become a wreckage to the great delight of the TPLF and its government. The conflict and the manner it was handled had a chilling effect on many of us, as we could not but wonder whether the democratic label of the CUD was not a lie. If the elected leader of the CUD is an old-fashioned dictator, as is now claimed by many CUD supporters, and if the first dispute provokes a split rather than a democratic correction, then the democratic credential of the whole movement is nothing short of a mirage. Split testifies to the absence of democratic mechanism of conflict resolution and the little zeal of leaders and followers to abide by democratic principles. It unveils the persistence of a zero-sum mentality behind the façade of democratic slogans.
By raising this issue, I am not favoring or blaming any faction; I am just pointing out the general failure of the movement. Indeed, the failure reveals the root cause of our misery since Ethiopia was dragged into the process of an ill-advised modernization, to wit, the conception of politics as a zero-sum game. That politics is viewed as a struggle in which winners take all and losers lose all has prevented the development of a culture of compromise and reconciliation, the very culture that we so badly need to materialize our conviction that democracy alone can remove the many obstacles hampering the modernization of our country.
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