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Reimagining and Contesting the Past
The interpretation of the Ethiopian past has been largely dominated, from the nineteenth century to the present, by a specific historiographical framework, variably called the 'Great tradition', 'Grand tradition', 'Ethiopianist tradition', 'Ethiopianist nationalism', 'Church and State tradition', 'Greater Ethiopia' approach, or 'Pan-Ethiopian ideology'.1This article maps out the origin and development of this hegemonic historiographical discourse. Mobilised by Ethiopian rulers to legitimise their power, the Great Tradition acted throughout the history of the Ethiopian monarchy as the dominant version of state nationalism. The historiographical influence of the Great Tradition has mostly derived from the position of sociopolitical power that its proponents have enjoyed within the Ethiopian state.2The rulers' political and narrative power always went hand in hand, and state-sponsored ideas of history were at their most influential when political power was successfully centralised and territorial control secured. The political centralisation characterising nineteenth-century Ethiopia, for instance, was supported by, and in turn supported, a consolidation of the Great Tradition. Starting from the late 1960s, but more prominently in the past thirty years, scholars and political actors have complained that by retaining a monopoly over how Ethiopia's past is interpreted, the Great Tradition has prevented a full-rounded understanding of Ethiopian history. This coincided, within Ethiopia and in the Ethiopian diaspora, with growing contestations of the state, its borders, and its systems of institutionalised exclusions. New paradigms gained visibility first in the public arena, and subsequently in academic scholarship. As we shall see below, a voluminous body of scholarly work has been produced to contest the Great Tradition's essentialist vision of identity, transcendental conception of history, unicentric and teleological orientation, and emphasis on concepts of continuity, indigeneity, and unity.
My argument is based on the Amharic works produced by the Ethiopian intellectual elites close to the centre of the state in Addis Ababa, where most cultural infrastructures such as publishing houses, primary- to tertiary-level educational institutions theatres, libraries, and bookstores were concentrated. Starting from a very restricted literate elite at the beginning of the century, the intellectual class gradually broadened with the opening of government-run schools in Addis Ababa and the launch of scholarship programmes for Ethiopian students to be...