The importance of Asres’s statement emerges when we see how his position directly clashes with the prevailing idea about Ethiopia. Most historians, archeologists, and linguists attribute Aksumite civilization to Semitic immigrants from South Arabia, and so assert that the present inhabitants of the northern part of Ethiopia, namely, Tigreans and Amhara, are Semitic rather than black Africans. Accordingly, all what Aksum has accomplished and the greatness of its civilization, included the written language of Ge’ez, are duplications of South Arabian civilization. The racist underpinning of the assertion is not hard to establish: since Ethiopia had an ancient and advanced civilization, its originators, so argue Europeans, must be Semitic invaders from Arabia, obvious as it is that blacks are not capable of such a realization. Concretely speaking, this means that Ethiopia moved to an advanced stage of civilization when Semitic invaders from South Arabia subdued the original black inhabitants known as the Agaw people.28 To quote an Ethiopian historian:
it is most likely that at the time of their earliest contact with the south Arabians the native people were in a primitive stage of material culture, and lived in small isolated clans or groups of clans with no state or political organizations. This must have given the immigrants an excellent opportunity to assert themselves and easily reduce the local population to a position of political vassalage. [29]
Strongly defending the originality of Aksumite civilization, Asres writes: history attests that “Ethiopia reached where it is today, not thanks to borrowed things, but thanks to the wisdom and script inherited from the kingdom of Ham.”30 Granted that Asres’s arguments are biblical rather than scientific, the truth remains that he is dissatisfied because he considers the Semitic thesis as the product of European machination aimed at denying the paternity of a great civilization to Ethiopians. He sees no other way to defend the originality of Ge’ez and the knowledge it carries than to go against the prevailing thesis by rejecting the Semitization of Ethiopians. Only the defense of the original blackness of Ethiopians can protect them against the contamination of Semitic borrowings and hence salvage the authenticity of the messianic vocation of Ethiopia. If Ge’ez is not native of Africa, then it is a borrowed language with the consequence that it is not the primary source of what it reveals. When we note that most modern educated Tigrean and Amhara scholars and the members of the Ethiopian ruling elites endorse the Semitic thesis, Asres’s position appears as a remarkable dissenting voice, all the more so as his deep traditionalism should have pushed him toward the Semitic thesis.
Asres is so determined to defend the blackness of Ethiopians that he reproaches young Ethiopians who go to America for studies of distancing themselves from people because they are black. He asks: “Why do you push back your brothers? Why do you think that your lighter skin is superior to their blackness? In your eyes, you are the second-ranking whites. In so thinking, don’t you see that you are but ranking Ethiopians below the whites?31 If it is slavery that is bothering Ethiopians, Asres reminds them that “slavery did not start with black people.”32 White people too became slaves in the past every time they lost military battles. Slavery has nothing to do with being black or white; worse yet, to look down on black people is “to deride and anger God,” since blacks are His creatures.33