Ethiopia
Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid
My reading habit really started before I could even read. Apparently,
as soon as I could sit up on my own, my favorite pastime was looking through
books. My family never invested in a play pen because a stack of books alone
could ensure my silence and my rapt attention. I would pick up the first book
on the stack and flip through the pages gingerly, setting it down on the
opposite side when I was finished with it. When I was done with the stack, I
would repeat the process over again. I did not start reading until I was four
years old, but the illustrations kept me occupied for hours.
When I was six years old, my mother gave me a huge sticker
book that contained a summary of each country of the world. I loved matching
the country summaries to the stickers of the national flags and country shapes.
After reading each and every one, I started to dog-mark the places that I
wanted most to visit someday. I found myself going back and back again to
Ethiopia – dreaming that I would one day travel there. My obsession went far
past my sticker book – as I scoured my mother’s art history books, especially
the ones that focused on Biblical topics, looking for paintings of the Queen of
Sheba, the mysterious and beautiful queen of Ethiopia.
Subsequently during the Open Embassy Day in Berlin, I had an
overwhelming desire to visit the Ethiopian Embassy. It was located in a
well-off neighborhood outside of the city in an exquisite old German house. Perhaps
we just arrived late in the day, but I was surprised that there was almost no
activity like in the other embassies – where people were dressed up, serving
food, making presentations, and showering me and my friends with attention. I
walked through the embassy until I reached a big open room – illuminated by
windows, but without a single lamp turned on. In that room sat an Ethiopian
woman, who was making coffee over coals. She motioned me over and poured me a
cup. As I sipped on the strong coffee, I walked over to a small table, where
there was sparse literature about the country. To my dismay, it was all about the
suffering of the Ethiopian people, encouraging donations of western
individuals, aid organizations, and governments. I found myself saddened by the
experience: the country that I had visited so often in my dreams as a child was
reduced to a disheveled place where I was supposed to feel sorry for, give some
money, and then feel good about myself.
It was perhaps this experience which led me to purchase
Peter Gill’s Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid, published in 2010
by Oxford University Press. Although I will say that I really did enjoy it, I
feel as if this is not the best book for someone with a fairly limited background
of the country, as it focuses almost exclusively on the country’s recent
history. I was born after the 1985 Live Aid, a concert which utilized star
power such as U2, Queen, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan, to bring awareness and
donations to Ethiopian famine relief. To me, this book was geared to an
audience who remembered the famine and Live Aid, rather than to an audience without
this background, as it seeks to explain the intricacies leading up to and after
the famine instead of providing a basic introduction.
Ethiopia is a country that is particularly historically
noteworthy on the African continent. The most populous landlocked country in
the world, Ethiopia is located in the conflict-prone region of the Horn of
Africa, surrounded by Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Sudan, and South
Sudan. The Axum kingdom converted to Christianity even before the Roman Empire.
It was never colonized by Europeans, but Abyssinia (what Ethiopia was called until
a 1974 coup d’etat by the socialist Derg movement) was a prize that was sought
by the Italians, and was the victim of Mussolini’s imperial ambitions. For
almost twenty years, Ethiopia was a pawn during the Cold War until it
transitioned to democracy in the early 1990s. Even in the midst of the Cold War
tensions, Ethiopia was a country even further surrounded by conflict (as the
Eritreans maintained their fight for independence from 1961-1991) and social
strife (as Ethiopia experienced several famines, most notably the 1983-5
famine, which caught the attention of the world.) I also find it necessary to
mention that Ethiopia is a multi-ethnic state with over 80 ethnic groups, the
four largest being Oromo (34.5%), Amhara (26.9%), Somali (6.2%), and Tigray
(6.1%).
This book is very interesting because it discusses Ethiopian
famine from a historical perspective. It is important to note that even today,
much of Ethiopia is based on subsistence farming. This so-called “food
insecurity” has led to even more famines since the 1980s, including a 2002-3
crisis. It is important to note that many experts believe that this food
insecurity will continue, due to bad governance, as well as the fact that “Ethiopia’s
80 million population will probably double again in 25-30 years.” (page 123) Famines
have been recurrent in Ethiopia for centuries with lasting and devastating
impacts: “This was the Great Famine of 1888 to 1892, known as ‘Evil days’… The
Great Famine that resulted may have killed a third of Ethiopia’s population,
then put at 12 million.” (page 27)
It is also extremely important to put the famine into social
perspective – not only with the Cold War, but also with the internal regional tensions.
While the Live Aid concerts raised almost 250 million dollars for famine relief,
it is noteworthy to recognize that famine was clearly not the top priority of
the government during this time: “The Russians airlifted 17,000 Cubans to help
defend socialist Ethiopia… In the three years which culminated in the
catastrophic famine of 1984, Ethiopia imported arms supplies worth $575
million, $975 million, and in the famine year itself $1.2 billion.” (page 56) The
socialist Derg leader, Colonel Mengistu, utilized the famine to further
consolidate his power over the Ethiopian people, further exacerbating the
problem through forced resettlement. He organized resettlement from the
famine-prone highlands to the lowlands, often into collectivized villages where
the people were exposed to hardship, as well as new diseases: “…the planned
scale of the resettlement programme measured up to Colonel Mengistu’s image as
the pocket African Stalin, and would be executed in a thoroughly ruthless
faction. Resettlement also served a darker political purpose, and it would be
enforced at the barrel of a gun.” (page 45)
Of course, this book also delves into more current issues
facing Ethiopia – especially how the aid industry can be seen as harmful to
economic and political growth. At the time of this book’s publication, prime
minister Meles Zenawi was still in the midst of his 17 years tenure (from 1995
to 2012), of which the author is skeptical. There is no doubt that charities and
aid organizations have become ever more important to the economy of Ethiopia: “By
2007 there had been a fivefold increase in international charities to 234 and
an extraordinary seventy-fold in Ethiopian NGOs to 1,742.” (page 177) However,
this has other effects past the economy. The author describes the 2005 election
and that international presence was not enough to ensure a peaceful, democratic
election as the ruling EPRDF (Ethiopian
People's Revolutionary Democratic Front) utilized hate speech (similar
to that used before the 1994 genocide in Rwanda) against the opposition CUD (Coalition for Unity and Democracy.) After
crying foul in regard to free elections, “Ms. Gomes’s [the EU Mission’s chief
observer to Ethiopia] confrontation with the Ethiopian government divided the
European Union. EU aid officials wanted her to tone down her criticism.
Ethiopia was ‘one of their biggest clients,” she said. Ethiopia is in fact the
largest recipient of EU aid to Africa. ‘They wanted business as usual, and they
didn’t want me to spill the beans.’” (page 151)
Peter Gill shares an interesting quote at the beginning of the
book, which I will end with: ‘World poverty is a burden to be shared, but there
is another principle now widely recognized. Poor countries will emerge from
poverty only when they take full charge of their own destiny.” (page 5)
Please feel free to comment on these topics or note
something interesting from the book. I look forward to hearing your
opinions!
I am curious to know where you got this Ethiopia political map. I believe it is many years out of date, possibly from about (Western year) 1995, because it reflects the independence of Eritrea but still too many territories. Gonder, Gojam, Welega and many others no longer exist. Instead, the current map has only 9 provinces and 2 Charter Cities, which did not exist prior to (Western year) 2004.
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