NEVIS REVIEW NO 9
Section I
Ref # 9.1
Ref # 9.1
January 28,
2013
Abuses and Uses of Cultural Diversity:
African Past, Ethiopian Present
By
Professor Andreas Esheté
We Africans
rightly take pride in our matchless wealth of cultural diversity. Despite the
luxuriant palette of Africa’s cultural communities and identities, we cannot as
yet claim that cultural pluralism is accorded
pride of
place in the political landscape across most of Africa. What explains the prevailing disposition in Africa
to look askance at federative ideals, among them: recognition of cultural
pluralism and identity;
collective
rights, including national self-determination? To register that the
characteristic African stance is puzzling, and calls for explanation, notice
that even a universalist, Marxist philosopher, the late Lezek
Kolakowski,
writing in the heyday of European integration, affirms that “… diversity can
only be assured by the preservation of distinctive national
identities”(Modernity on Endless Trial [1997], 59). A first
straightforward
explanation is to note that what federalism demands by way of limitation,
division and dispersal of political authority draws upon fundamental values of
democratic rule. Remember, too, E.M.
Forster’s
slogan: “Two cheers for Democracy: One because it admits variety… “(Two Cheers
for Democracy [1951]). Our own early attempt at Ethio-Eritrean federation
withered chiefly for lack of a democratic breathing space. So federalism may
not have flourished in Africa, in part, for want of a deep commitment to
democracy.
Beyond this,
there were historical circumstances, not of our ownmaking, that furnished
Africans compelling cause for skepticism about federative values and
institutions. These circumstances involve the
political
abuse of cultural pluralism to support racism and to legitimate regimes
upholding racial supremacy. A glaring, familiar example is that of the United
States, where slavery and racial segregation were protected by invoking
federalism and state’s rights— a position sometimes vindicated by the federal
government, including the Supreme Court. Closer to home, racial laws were
imposed in Eritrea and, for a brief time, in Ethiopia to force territorial and
social segregation of Italians and Africans as well as to dictate separate
settlement of African cultural communities.
Racial
segregation and the complete subordination of colonized peoples to the white
colonizers was commonplace throughout most colonial territories: India during
the latter half of British rule is a striking
example.
Perhaps the worst abuse of cultural pluralism and identity here in Africa was
apartheid in South Africa, where cultural values were explicitly and perversely
put forward as the basis for legitimating
racism and
racial supremacy. The deep wrongs of the system are plain and well known:
first, the denial of fundamental freedoms and rights as well as the extreme
material deprivation of those who were not white
on the ground
that they are less human and therefore undeserving of equal concern; second,
forcing identities on persons and communities, identities not chosen or
affirmed by Africans but rather arbitrarily
imposed by
the ruling whites.
Perhaps the most
telling case of capriciously inflicting identities is the fate of those
designated “Coloured” under apartheid. J.M. Coetzee, the distinguished South
African Nobel laureate novelist, describes their sad, strange fate well, “. . .
if there was no “Coloured” community prepared to
concede that it had preexisted its creation by
apartheid, then, logically, there could be no community criterion of
“Colouredness”. Throughout the apartheid years the status “Coloured” was,
across almost the entire range of people whom it implicated, accepted, so to
speak, under protest, as an identity forced upon them. Insofar as there is or
was a ‘’Coloured’’ community, it was created by the common fate of being forced
to behave, in the face of authority, as “Coloured” (Stranger Shores [2001,
253])
There are
other situations, beyond ongoing governing arrangements such as apartheid and
indirect rule, where a cultural community is identified only to be targeted.
For instance, in the Mau Mau uprising in
Kenya, the
Kikuyu were singled out and subjected to massive executions, massacres,
incarceration and torture in concentration camps by colonial forces they could
not possibly match.
The
aspiration to recognize and preserve cultural diversity and distinctive
identities was thus variously manipulated to rationalize what everyone would
now agree are unjust systems of white supremacy such as slavery, segregation
and apartheid, systems under which the lives of millions of Africans and others
were doomed. Despite the horrors, it may be tempting to put aside the evil
deployment of cultural diversity and identity as another aberrant manifestation
of a ruthless will to dominate
by those
willfully or habitually blind to the humanity of others.
But it would
be too easy to say that what we have been attending to is a mere aberrant lapse
into inhumanity by occasional barbarity in western culture. A glance at the
best of universalist liberalism, with robust aspirations to be inclusive of
humanity, betrays a similar tendency to draw upon facts of culture and cultural
difference in order to exclude the portion of humanity that is not white from
the domain of freedom and equality. (On this I have benefited from Uday Mehta,
“Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” (Politics and Society [December 1990, vol.
18, no. 4: 427-454]). Thus, John Stuart Mill, a radical, eloquent voice of
liberalism and a pioneer advocate of the emancipation of slaves and women,
suggests that the principle of liberty is not suited to backward peoples. Mill
explains the exclusion: “Liberty as a principle has no application to any state
of things anterior to the time when mankind has become capable of being
improved by free and equal discussion.
Until then,
there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlamagne,
if they are so fortunate as to find one” (On Liberty [1859]) And again in
Representative Government [1861], Mill
distinguishes
between two kinds of colonies: first, those such as America and Australia with
a civilization and culture similar to that of the ruling society, Britain;
second, colonies whose language and culture differ from Britain’s. Mill finds
the former fit for representative government; the latter, on the other hand,
should settle for what Mill describes as “a choice of despotisms”. I am not
here pointing to a lingering prejudice of the nineteenth century, a relic
banished in the twentieth century.As protest voiced by the likes of W.E.B.
DuBois shows, the United Nations Charter, drawn up in midcentury, makes no
mention of the independence of peoples and territories under imperial rule.
I hope I have
said enough to indicate a persistent resort to cultural diversity and identity
both to deny Africans a title to liberty and equality and to assert white
supremacy. Sadly, what Africans prized
about
themselves and perhaps the only thing of value left to hold on to amid
unfreedom and destitution was mercilessly turned against them. It is therefore
unsurprising that Africans would often be inclined to hold cultural diversity
and distinctiveness at bay. What is more, the fight for liberation waged
against great odds to be free of colonial rule necessitated wide mobilization
and hence inclusive nationalism. Still, Africans distancing themselves from
their dark memories did not altogether
disavow
cultural diversity and distinctiveness. Indeed, milestones of African
collective self-expression such as negritude, African socialism and the African
Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights all manifest an attachment and commitment
to the value of community and the value of particular cultures. Rather, the
reaction to a dark past largely came to a reluctance to give political
recognition, authority and legitimacy to cultural diversity and
distinctiveness.
The African
reaction, born of bitter experience, is not unique. An analogous retreat from
federalist ideals and institutions transpired in the United States in
consequence of the abuse of state’s rights and federalism as masks and shields
for racial injustice and disregard for minority rights. I cannot now narrate,
let alone explain, how the abuse of federalism led to a turn away from
federalist conceptions of public values and institutions. I will just sketch a
characterization of the important shift in constitutionalism and constitutional jurisprudence.
The Fourteenth
Amendment held that the states, not just federal government, must comply with
the requirements of the Bill of Rights. But this revolutionary extension in the
reach of constitutional rights
was coupled
with a radical recasting of the conception of rights. Before Reconstruction, it
is arguable that many rights enunciated in the Amendments were collective
entitlements belonging to the people
as associated
in bodies such as local churches, legislatures, juries, conventions and
militias. What tended to be seen after Reconstruction as civil rights affording
individuals protection from federal and state government – rights to speak, to
worship, to assemble, to petition, and to bear arms – were originally construed
as political rights empowering popular bodies of citizens to enjoy a share in
self-government and thereby to serve as alternative seats of public authority.
In his book, The Bill of Rights (1997), Akhil Reed Amar, a keen student of
federalism at Yale, demonstrates the wide gulf separating the American
conception of rights before and after Reconstruction – a turn from a republican
to a liberal conception of rights that has since proved influential beyond the
United States. The shift has been bolstered in the second half of the twentieth
century during the second Reconstruction, following Brown vs. Board of
Education. What was lost in the course of these worthy struggles for freedom
was Madison’s original idea that localism and liberty or, differently,
federalism and freedom, can be mutually supportive.
I have been
trying to suggest that with cultural diversity, cultural identity and
federalism, as with much else in our public life, historical context can shape
our starkest political choices and our deepest political
allegiances.
This is not to question or deny the possibility of providing principled reasons
to justify our political choices and allegiances. It is rather to admit that it
matters whether or not historical conditions are favorable to what is favored
by reasons of principle. To adapt a phrase from Joseph Brodsky: “There are
times when history is inescapable” – an observation I believe we will see also
bears on how Ethiopia resolved to turn onto a federalist path.
The excursus
into the abuse of cultural pluralism should give us pause from reductively
regarding all Africans alike as emerging from the same unhappy past rooted in
dirt and proceeding to find a place in the sun in a national state. Against
this backdrop, it may be easier to see that unhappy peoples, not unlike unhappy
families, can be (to adopt a famous phrase) unhappy each in its own way, and
hence starkly different. A look at Ethiopia’s peculiar past and her divergent
departure from it may show why Ethiopia was conducive to federalism.
In Ethiopia,
which had managed to remain free of colonial rule, the ruling political order
sought to create a modern, unitary government rooted in an inclusive national
culture, bent on the assimilation or subordination of all Ethiopian cultural
communities to the language and religion of the particular culture privileged
by the state. In Ethiopia, to embrace cultural diversity and the preservation
of cultural distinctiveness was therefore not to keep but rather to defy the
old ruling order. To champion
the political
freedom and equality of all cultural communities here was to call for the
emancipation of many whose cultures and identities had been scorned, their land
and labor forcibly taken by those who belonged to the politically privileged
culture.
Despite the
state’s determination to impose inclusive nationalism, it cannot be said that
the mission was altogether successful. The state’s limited power and the poor
penetration of its economic and social
institutions
did not permit deep entrenchment of an inclusive culture. There was also a
sense of patriotism across cultural communities so that they all came to the
country’s defense during attempts at conquest
by imperial
and fascist Italy. Notwithstanding patriotic solidarity in the face of alien
aggression and the state’s ardent assertion of inclusive nationalism, there was
recurrent nationalist resurgence against a centrist, homogenizing state
throughout imperial and military rule. During most of his regime, Haile Sellassie
had to contend with nationalist rebellion by a wide range of cultural
communities: Tigrai, Oromo, Gojjam, Somali, Eritrea. Under the military, armed
contest by organized nationalist movements plunged the country into protracted
civil war, ending finally with the defeat of the military in 1991.
Why did
defeat of the military usher in the political recognition of diversity and
self-rule as the political instrument for preserving the equality and freedom
of distinct cultural communities? The defeat of the military was seen by the
chief protagonists as a revolution bound to bring about a new constitution of
the political community. To capture the novelty, it is important to be clear on
what was defeated. As Hannah
Arendt
remarks: “nothing seems more natural than that a revolution should be
predetermined by the type of government it overthrows.” The revolutionary
self-image of the agents who defeated the military regime is confirmed by
observers. For instance, Christopher Clapham says: “… The overthrow of the
military in 1991 amounted to more than the collapse of a particular regime. It
effectively marked the failure of a project, dating back to Menelik’s accession
in 1889 of creating a ‘modern’ and centralized state around a Showan core”
(Peter Woodward and Murray Forsyth (eds.) Conflict and Peace in the Horn of
Africa: Federalism and its Alternatives [1994, 37]).
The defeat of
the military regime thus spelled the end of the defining political project of
modern Ethiopia. In spite of the end of monarchy and in the face of formidable
resistance from nationalist movements, the
military
desperately clung to the project it had inherited from modern imperial
Ethiopia. Beyond doing away with the crown, the military, inspired and
mobilized by the Ethiopian left, had attempted to answer
the chief
social question of the country by nationalizing land and by releasing the
peasantry from the burdens of tenancy. Yet, it soon became clear that the state
used its tyrannical powers to make increasingly large demands on the lives and
labors of peasants, demands that became more onerous than their obligations
under the previous regime. Citizens and communities realized that newly found
access to land cannot be meaningful unless they enjoyed political authority
over land as well as over the disposal of their labor and their produce.
In 1991, each
of the nationalist movements had organized and marched under the banner of
their own cultural or national identity and in the name of the right to
self-determination. Whatever their other aspirations, the victors were eager to
be rid of resentful memories of the fallen order and its dead project. It is
not easy to convey the urgency, anxiety and intensity sweeping so many ready to
unshackle themselves from a deeply troubling, powerful legacy. The words of the
Turkish Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, about the passing of another empire may
help to evoke the unsettled climate of feeling. He writes: “the melancholy of
this dying culture was all around us. Great as the desire to westernize and to
modernize may have been, the more desperate wish was probably to be rid of all
the bitter memories of the fallen empire, rather as a spurned lover throws away
his lost beloved’s clothes, possessions, and photographs” (Istanbul: Memories
and the City, 2005).
In view of
the exacting sacrifices made to win, no nationalist movement would have
consented to a constitutional arrangement that would incur risk of a return of
the old order and its defining project. Now that the champions of the project
were powerless, there was little reason for nationalist movements to entrust
their fate to the contingent balance of power among groups and interests,
however circumscribed
by democratic
rights and procedures. Having supported Eritrean selfdetermination and with evident
preparedness to go along with Eritrean independence, it was not clear how
political movements long committed to self-determination could reasonably
refuse self-rule or the right to secede to any cultural community in Ethiopia.
In this historical setting, the makers of a new constitution had little reason
to resist but abundant reasons to seek a federal constitution. It was a time,
once again, when history proved irresistible.
So far my
claim on behalf of federalism is that it enabled both Ethiopia’s survival and
the establishment of legitimate political authority – two foundational
accomplishments without which the pursuit of other
public aims
is unthinkable. Thanks to federalism, many who felt they had been renounced by
their birthplace were now persuaded not to renounce Ethiopia but instead to
join together to form a legitimate
political
order for peaceful mutual cooperation.
Once in
place, federalism subserved wider public aims. For one thing, it enabled
democratic values and practices not easily secured under the burden of poverty
and the lack of a background democratic culture such as a culture of peace, the
rule of law, secularism, a free press, competitive political parties, and free
associations. Put differently, in the face of the burdens of pervasive poverty
and a lifeless public culture, the collective rights and political spaces of
federalism eased the transaction costs and coordination problems that usually
hamper effective exercise of individual and group rights by ordinary citizens.
Regional
states with robust self-rule over their territories created a firm check on the
abuse of federal authority and on illegal transfer of the power of government.
Regional states also offered new spaces where citizens can deliberate, decide
and act on a wide range of public issues. They assumed responsibility for the
provision of justice, education and health care. More importantly, the
dispersal of power away from the centre to the periphery served radical
democracy by extending to
the many and
the least advantaged the opportunity to enter their vital interests into the
national political agenda: for example, hunger, poverty, agricultural
productivity, rural schools and health services, rural roads, access to water
and electricity, and rural gender issues such as freedom from abduction
The dispersal
of power, moreover, yields a more equitable distribution of resources as well
as greater accountability of public authority to citizens. Fair representation
of cultural communities in the federal
legislature and
executive together with the mobilization of regions in public policy and action
makes for popular engagement in development and more equitable distribution of
its fruits. Equitable share in growth together with special support for
historically disadvantaged cultural communities and groups is the basis for a
new sense of solidarity among all citizens and communities.
With all
these happy outcomes, it is still too early to speak with confidence about
federalism’s trajectory. There are still those who oppose federalism and mourn
loss of the past. For some federalism seems a diminishment of Ethiopian
identity: a provincial profile has, in their eyes, supplanted a glorious
self-image. They forget that the grand and self-aggrandizing narratives and
icons of empire are entirely alien to many. Even events and symbols commanding
wide collective pride are not equally or similarly
prized by all
peoples of Ethiopia. Victory at Adwa earned international recognition and
prestige for Menilik’s Ethiopia, an accomplishment about which conquered
peoples of imperial Ethiopia, including those that fought valiantly at Adwa,
are bound to be ambivalent.
A true
portrayal of our past can no longer be a triumphant tale of the elect. A sense
of the past we can all reasonably and honorably share must be shaped by the
stories of those in our midst who were variously excluded, humiliated and
victimized. If weaving their stories into our past diminishes the grandeur,
purity or allure of our self-image, this is a price we should be happy to pay
in keeping with fidelity to truth
and
solidarity with communities that endured grave indignities in the making of our
history. There are others who also long for a different past, a past they see
through nostalgic eyes as an age of innocence, when, supposedly unmindful of
differences, we all lived in harmony. Those enamored of an imagined innocent
past could do well to remember that: “The difference between an identity which
is mine and I eagerly recognize as mine, and an identity which someone else
simply assumes to be me, is in one sense all the difference in the world”
(Bernard Williams, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline [2008, 62]).
Those who
have experienced this deep difference – and there are by now countless many in
Ethiopia – are now too self-conscious of their own identity and their title to
it to be able or willing to forget. Since innocence once lost is generally
irreversibly lost, it may now be too late to recover the past. If the past is
shown to be false or no longer available, it is not difficult to resist the
elusive, illusory quest of those who persist in looking forward to the past.
Let me
conclude with brisk remarks about federalism’s future in Ethiopia. Beyond
cultivating cultural pluralism, federalism has lent support to political
pluralism as well as to the cause of greater political
and social
equality. The wider political community manifests political cohesion and
solidarity stemming from the freedom, equality and diversity of the constituent
parts. Political cohesion and solidarity resting on the autonomy and integrity
of the diverse parts has, in turn, galvanized the populace into concerted
public engagement and action, resulting in unprecedented advance in the quest
to find freedom from
hunger and
poverty. Material advance and the attendant emergence and spread of industrial
and urban life will no doubt engender greater uniformity and mix among cultural
communities. Material progress will equally encourage wider moral and political
pluralism, thereby generating individual and collective identities that will
compete with and cross cultural identities. To make room for the emergence, and
realization
of novel diversities and identities would require vigilant respect of
individual and group rights in regional states as well as free and open flow of
people, ideas and free associations across states.
With material
advance and the fulfillment of the constitutional aspiration to create a
single, living political community and an integrated economy, I think we will
also come to feel the need for an animated,
particularist
sense of our common Ethiopian identity. I submit the wisdom of reaching for a
sense of the whole that is more than the sum of the constituent parts. To
complement and transfigure our diverse
identities
calls for the cultivation of a new sense of a shared history, shared public
ideals and a shared identity that captures what binds us together as citizens
of a single political community with a singular
destiny.
As you can
tell from my lamentably sketchy account, Ethiopian federalism is still an
unfolding work-in-progress. I hope and trust that you – champions, friends, and
students – of federalism, with far richer
experiences
of federalism, will help us see how best to go forward. We can surely benefit
from wise counsel, because we are embarking on uncharted terrain in an unusual
historical context. Today, more than ever, many are persuaded that particular
cultures are fated to vanish or fade with the advent of modernity. Some are
resigned to this fate, others defy it by means that are sharply different:
first, to cordon off culture as best one can; second, to repudiate modernity.
Ours, however, is a rare, bold venture of deploying the cultivation of our own
culture and identity with all its rich diversity as a leading asset in our
determination to become a proud member of a cosmopolitan community of peoples
on our own terms.
--------------------
(Ed’s
Note-Professor Andreas Esheté studied philosophy at Williams College and Yale University. He
is Professor of Law and Philosophy, UNESCO Chair
for Human Rights, Peace and Democracy (AAU), and now Advisor
to the Prime Minister of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia with the rank of minister.)
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