That Asres’s deep and first hand knowledge of tradition could miss that the notion of idil presupposes an open society is hardly believable. Idil posits a society allowing social mobility; it does not make sense in a society blocked by human-made privileges, such as the Ethiopian society under the imperial regime with its hereditary monarchy and nobility together with individual nobles possessing private property and using tenants in their land. These privileges constituted formidable social barriers and artificial impediments standing in the way of God’s choices. Because of his reluctance to criticize the imperial regime, Asres thus misses the opportunity of demonstrating the value of tradition by showing how well the notion of idil fits into the modernizing goal. The demonstration of a connivance with modernity would have, in turn, advocated the return and consolidation of the traditional social mobility rather than its elimination.
Lastly, it is obvious that despite his rage against the West, Asres is not quite successful in combating its influence. In many ways, he agrees with the norms of the West. The agreement transpires frequently, as when he intimates that Ethiopia regressed because of Gran’s invasion. The destructions caused by the invasion were so extensive that Ethiopians lost many of the technological advances that they had to the benefit of Europeans. In thus assigning similar technological goals to Ethiopians and Westerners, Asres gives up the opportunity of describing the Ethiopian civilization in terms of alternative civilization rather than in terms of a similar civilization that had regressed. Contrary to the notion of different or alternative civilization, the notion of regress confirms the idea of European superiority instead of challenging it.
Likewise, Asres’s attempt to explain Western racism as a behavior induced by revenge leads him to say that blacks had dominated and mistreated white people in the past. The statement presents world history as a field of fierce competition between races impelled by similar goals. In so thinking, Asres is not analyzing different civilizations in terms of divergent aspirations and means, as did, for instance, the African revivalist school known as Negritude. Arguing that each culture has its own way of thinking as well as its own goals, the thinkers of Negritude reject Europeans’ claim that they “were the only ones who had thought out a Civilization to the level and the dimension of University.”56 The failure to particularize shows that Asres did not manage to think Western civilization and its achievements as a particular civilization among other equally valid civilizations. Instead, he endorses the normativeness of Western civilization by perceiving its aspirations, especially its technological goals, as universal aspirations, that is, aspirations shared by all people regardless of their culture and race. Willy-nilly, this way of posing the problem puts the West in the driver seat of history, and so fails to question its colonizing goal.
Notes
1) I translate the Amharic title “Tekami Mikre” as “Useful Advice.” I add that all the direct quotations from the book are my own translations, which are loose but accurate.
2) See Useful Advice (Addis Ababa: Berhanena Selam Printing Press, 1958), p. 22.
3) It would be undoubtedly very revealing to compare Asres with the early Westernized intellectuals of Ethiopia, such as Afework Gebre Yesus and Gebrehiwot Baykedagn. As a representative of the traditional scholar, Asres shares none of their views, which derive from the conviction that Ethiopia cannot modernize unless it throws away its traditional beliefs and values and unreservedly opens up to the West. Ethiopia’s failure to modernize may be due to the failure to reconcile these two divergent mental directions. For further reading, see Messay Kebede, “Gebrehiwot Baykedagn, Eurocentrism, and the Decentering of Ethiopia,” Journal of Black Studies, 36: 6 (July 2006), pp. 815-832.
4) Asres, Useful Advice, p. 5.
5) Ibid.
6) Ibid.
7) See Messay Kebede, Survival and Modernization–Ethiopia’s Enigmatic Present: A Philosophical Discourse (Lawrenceville, .N.J.: The Red Sea Press Inc., 1999).
8)Asres, Useful Advice Ibid., p. 6.
9) Ibid.
10)Ibid., p. 82.
11) Ibid., p. 6.
12) Ibid., p. 8.
13) Ibid., p. 18.
14) Ibid., p. 7.
15) Ibid., p.38.
16) Ibid., p. 46.
17) Ibid., p. 8.
18) Ibid.
19) Ibid., p. 7.
20) Ibid.
21) Ibid., p. 8.
22) Ibid.
23) Ibid., p. 10.
24) Ibid.
25) Ibid., p. 16.
26) Ibid.
27) Ibid., p. 18.
28) For more discussion on this issue, see Messay Kebede, “Eurocentrism and Ethiopian Historiography: Deconstructing Semitization,” International Journal of Ethiopian Studies, 1: 1 (Fall 2003), pp. 1-19.
29) Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 8.
30) Asres, Useful Advice, p. 20.
31) Ibid., p. 58.
32) Ibid.
33) Ibid., p. 69.
34) Ibid., p. 62.
35) To read more on this issue, refer to Messay Kebede, Survival and Modernization–Ethiopia’s Enigmatic Present: A Philosophical Discourse.
36) Asres, Useful Advice, p. 63-58.
37) Ibid., p. 65.
38) Ibid., p. 34.
39) Ibid., p. 82.
40) See, ibid., p. 83.
41) Ibid.
42) Ibid., p. 88.
43) Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1974), p. xiv.
44) Ibid., p. 156.
45) Diop, “African Cultural Unity,” Présence Africaine, 24–25 (1959), p. 71.
46) See Asres, Useful Advice., p. 18.
47) Ibid., p. 26.
48) See Ibid., p. 27.
49) Ibid., p. 28.
50) Ibid., p. 42.
51) Ibid., pp. 30-31.
52) Ibid., p. 43.
53) Ibid., p. 49.
54) See ibid., p. 43.
55) Ibid.
56) Léopold S. Senghor, Prose and Poetry, trans. John Reed and Clive Wake (London: Heinemann, 1976), p. 73.
57) For further discussion on the idea of alternative civilizations, see Messay Kebede, Africa’s Quest for a Philosophy of Decolonization (New York: Rodopi, 2004).