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Aleqa Asres Yenesew by Prof. Messay Kebede

Return to the Source: Aleqa Asres Yenesew and the West

By Prof Messay Kebede

Opening Remarks

I originally intended to send this paper to a professional journal. I changed my mind because its message deserves to be read by a wider public. And since the best way to reach a wider public is through the Web, I sent the paper to popular Ethiopian websites without altering its academic form and diluting its contents, except for some theoretical ramifications.
In many ways, the ideas that Aleqa Aseres Yenesew develops in the book that I am analyzing directly deal with the problems that Ethiopia and Ethiopian society face today. The book is highly interesting because it suggests that the mess we are in now has its seed in the adoption of a wrong educational policy since the end of the Italian war. Asres proposes solutions in which he discloses the elementary fact that the heritage of a legacy and the assumption of a common destiny define a nation rather than its ethnic or linguistic oneness. He shows this in his defense of Ge’ez language: for him, this Tigrean legacy is the essence of Ethiopian identity. Consequently, what makes you Ethiopian is less your identity as Amhara (he himself is an Amhara of Gojjam) than the heritage of Ge’ez legacy. Unity lies in the acceptance of a common heritage and destiny.
But what about the southern peoples of Ethiopia who do not trace their identity back to Ge’ez? Here Asres advances a bold assertion by questioning the Western qualification of Ge’ez as a Semitic language that invaders from South Arabia brought with them. He emphatically argues that Ethiopians are black and that Ge’ez is an African language. For him, the Semitic thesis is a Western machination intended to create a divide between northern and southern Ethiopia. The direction of history is clear: the torch of Ge’ez––which is then an idea, a divine mission, and not an ethnic identity––must pass to southern peoples. And it cannot do so unless Ethiopians present themselves as the descendants of Ham.
The objection that Asres’s reasoning lacks scientific credibility because it is filled with biblical references and argumentations would miss the important point that what matters in this case is not that facts justify the discourse, but whether the discourse is empowering, whether it organizes the world in such a way that it gives us strength, unity, and historical destiny. Besides, one can take away the biblical content and only retain the logic of national unity and empowerment. When I wrote my book, Survival and Modernization, I was not even remotely aware of Asres’s works. Yet what a delightful surprise when I discovered that many of my findings reproduce Asres’s thought! I take this opportunity to thank Aleme Tadesse for introducing me to Asres’s writings.


Introduction

The opposition of traditional scholars to the proliferation of modern schools is a fact known to all those who are familiar with the difficult beginning of Ethiopia’s modernization. Besides the opposition of the nobility and the church hierarchy, traditional scholars known as debtera had used all their influence to convince the country of the perilous nature of Western education. Emperor Haile Selassie and those who supported him often had to battle energetically to neutralize their opposition. To the youngsters sent to Western schools before and soon after the Italian invasion of 1935, the opposition of the debtera appeared as a pathetic attempt to stop what was unstoppable, namely, the march of the long-awaited modernization of Ethiopia. They easily figured out that the debtera’s ignorance of the modern world and the anger against the loss of their traditional influence aroused the resistance. To them, the defense of the traditional schooling betrayed the most stubborn form of traditionalism, which was nothing else but a wrong-headed endeavor to shield Ethiopia from the benefits of modernization in the name of tradition and the status quo.
In retrospect, the judgment of the early students appears misplaced and irresponsible. True, the debtera had a major weakness, which was that they opposed Western schools without suggesting any other alternative. They were totally unable to tell how Ethiopia could modernize without adopting Western rationality, science, and technology, the very virtues that the traditional knowledge had, if not condemned, at least ignored. More yet, the debtera did not seem to understand how necessary modernization was for the maintenance of Ethiopia’s independence. Especially after the dreadful episode of the Italian occupation, which made palpable the dependence of Ethiopia’s survival on rapid modernization, the defense of traditionalism could not be characterized as nothing other than foolish blindness.
Granted these legitimate criticisms, granted also that traditionalism was incompatible with survival, the fact remains that the condemnation of the opposition of the debtera was singularly one-sided and hardly clever. Notably, it missed the core message of the opposition, to wit, that the zeal to appropriate Western knowledge and know-how may result in the loss of the very independence that it wants to protect.
Such is the vigorous message that emanates from one of Asres Yenesew’s books titled Useful Advice. Asres––a senior cleric and a leading scholar of the Ethiopian Church––lived at a time when Haile Selassie was forcefully pushing for the spread of modern education to the detriment of traditional schools. Undoubtedly, Asres was traditionalist with all the fibers of his soul. For instance, he literally accepted the biblical story of the creation of man and the Earth and, as we shall see, his arguments are often biblical. He believed in the magical power of certain plants against devilish forces. What cannot be taken away from him, however, was that the need to benefit and empower Ethiopia fully inspired his traditionalism. He was sincerely convinced that the best weapon against the marginalization of Ethiopia by Western powers was the revival of some core traditional beliefs.

The Traditional Intellectual

Written with essentially children and youngsters in mind, Asres’s Useful Advice contains, as the title indicates, analyses of some dangerous developments and recommendations on how to neutralize them, all drawn from the stock of traditional beliefs. It is a defense of tradition, but less to shield tradition against external contaminations than to present it as the best antidote against ominous developments. It is a plea for a return to the source in the face of dangerous trends. Explaining why he wrote the book, Asres alludes to his concern about what he saw and observed and his “obligation to present his reflections to the public.” His attempt to counter threats leads him not only to defend tradition, but also to reveal the deep meanings of some of its beliefs, which meanings appear today quite revolutionary in light of the extensive endeavor to denounce Eurocentrism and weaken its grip on third-world intellectual productions.
In direct connection with his felt obligation to write, Asres underlines the social function of intellectuals and writers. He compares the writer to an army intelligence officer: a people without intellectuals are unable to protect themselves, just as “an army without intelligence is likely to surrender to the enemy before it undertakes anything.” To make the parallel clearer, he adds that a people without intellectuals are like a bee that is unable to find flowers: “just as a bee cannot make honey unless it absorbs the nectar of flowers, so too a people without intellectuals cannot achieve knowledge, diligence, and progress.”
This definition of the intellectual places Ethiopia in an obvious context of threat and war. Intellectuals are the scouts or the outposts of their society, and as such responsible for scrutinizing the surrounding world. Interestingly, the allusion to flowers and bees seem to suggest that the author has no quarrel with the Western world, provided that Ethiopians are able to extract the nectar by separating the benefits of the modern world from its detriments. The responsibility of separating the good from the bad falls on intellectuals whose role is thus to filter external influences.

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