 #3: What is the single most important lesson that we can learn from our encounters and experiments with modernity from Italian-Occupied through present day post-Revolutionary Ethiopia? Berhanu Yalew Yihun A very hard question. One lesson is that modernization--one anchored in Ethiopian traditions--can be ushered in under the leadership of a benevolent dictator or an active citizenry. You know the one on a white horse, not the one on a Toyota Land Cruiser. The second path also involves a Catch-22 scenario. Citizens are too poor to rein in warlords, and warlords do not have a vested interest in listening to pre-modern Neanderthals. The light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be an oncoming train with alarming consistency. I do hope that the urban classes will soon discover the merits of collective action over quiet suffering. Did you ask me about Italian contributions? Okay, you really meant to. I was going to say the roads, the school and office buildings, and the "modern" qey mebratoch (I bet many innocent Seledoch are struggling to figure out the sem’nna-worq here). The café culture, too—modernized idleness for the less productive classes, wouldn’t you say?
Dr. Fekade Azeze Allow me to present my case by the example of authoring, directing and performing a play. As far as the plays on the so-called Ethiopian "civilization", "modernization", "development", "democratisation" etc. are concerned they have always been authored, directed and performed by ill-informed persons. The rulers of the country and their educated partners deluded themselves by thinking that they were the authors, directors and the main actors of these plays. However, the truth has always been far from this. These plays were never written by Ethiopian authors who studied the country’s human, material and cultural resources, who understood the many secrets of the society, who had the genius to gently and carefully swim through these realities and attempted to unravel and resolve the various problems of the country. They never had Ethiopian directors who had the ability to examine the true nature of these compositions either. The self-appointed directors seized the opportunities they found and shamelessly staged the ill-composed plays by selecting their actors from a host of untalented, job-seeking, phony actors. I have for a long time imagined myself and the majority of the people of this country, as persons cursed to watch these ill-composed, ill-directed and ill-acted plays during the last three and a half decades. What is worse the governed, especially the educated section of the society, have never seriously sought inspiration from traditional, social organizations (such as "edir" and "equb"), the indigenous knowledge and practices, and the vast pool of knowledge humanity has garnered to date, and organized itself to best author, direct and perform plays that truly depict its material and spiritual needs and the ways and means of achieving them. It has persistently attempted to parrot foreign words, phrases and ideologies, however, it has consistently failed in this too. The single most important lesson it should have learnt is the fact that sheer pretensions to parrot Europe, "socialism", "democracy", "constitution" etc. lead nowhere.
Ato Gaitachew Bekele
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