The book launch included a panel discussion with reviews from professor Shiferaw Bekele (Addis Ababa University), professor Gebru Tareke (Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York), Dr. Assefa Bequele (Executive director African Child Policy Forum) and Dr. Constatinos Berhe (Chair, Ethiopian Center for Strategic Studies). Dr. Constatinos review can also be read in this article.
Bahru Zewde is currently Emeritus Professor of History at Addis Ababa University and Executive Director of the Forum for Social Studies. He got his BA from Haile Sellassie I University (1970) and his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. “The essays in this recent collection span 34 years, from 1972 to 2006, momentous years in which Ethiopia underwent ciolent internal upheavals and murderous international wars, the substance of its history called into question” writes Donald Crummey, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His colleague Shiferaw Bekele, associate professor of History at Addis Ababa University writes: “By the turn of the 21st century, Bahru had become the doyen of Ethiopian historians and a leading figure in contemporary intellectual life of the country.”
Dr. Constatinos Berhe writes this in his review of the latest essay collection:
Bahru as a public intellectual:
Prof Bahru’s recently published “collected essays” -Society, State and History, segmented into historiography, ethno-history and language, economic history and political economy, intellectual and social history, political and military history, political violence and environmental and urban history, reminds us of the prevailing intellectual movement of the Renaissance - humanism, a philosophical underpinning that humans are rational beings and emphasising the dignity and worth of the individual, an emphasis that was central to Renaissance developments in many areas.
In a continent where we have been brought up in an environment where certain dysfunctional behaviours that hamper effective communication and cause conflict are the norm: personalisation of issues, parochialism, chronic suspicion and mistrust, paranoia, lack of empathy and empathetic understanding, lack of suspending judgment, character assassination, lack of openness, holding grudges, envy, stubbornness and lack of compromise; disappointment over nationalistic authoritarian regimes may have contributed to the fact that today religion offers a new and subjectively more convincing language for old political orientations. A threatened nation can react to uncertain dangers solely through administrative channels, to the truly embarrassing situations.
In such an environment and as public intellectual, Bahru, has assumed to be a communicator and participant in public debates, communicating current and historical perspectives on a variety of societal issues, not just his specialist area – history; and primarily concerned with ideas and knowledge – responding and documenting societal issues and concerns and providing a voice for others who may not have the skills, time or opportunity. As a genuine and authentic intellectual, he has remained an active but a non-partisan player, on the margins of the African political scene, where he can make a difference’ Frank Furedi wrote that "intellectuals are not defined according to the jobs they do but the manner in which they act, the way they see themselves and the values that they uphold.” Indeed, Bahru, in his many works, has proven that public intellectuals do usually emerge from the educated
elite2 - a type of convergence with, and participation in, the open, contemporary public sphere that distinguishes him from other academics.3 Going outside his historical niche and addressing the general public, has allowed him to become a public intellectual.
As a public intellectual he has brought in Society, State and History controversial topics in the forefront of public discussion - often speaking historically in the issues of the day, but trying to counter unanswerable enquiries, acting solely on intellectual and morality imperatives more than considerations of a career that has spawned over three decades of intellectual essence, i.e., linking cerebral research with public policy.
Naïve realism vs. humanism
From Rwanda to Ethiopia, through out his book, the notion of naïve realism in the rhetorical over-simplification of the articulation of the societal transition process has been invoked to point to certain conceptual shortcomings in current perspectives on historical reforms in Africa and particularly Ethiopia. These shortcomings can be seen as outcomes of more or less conscious attempts of indigenous governments and their international backers to quickly get their hands on "urgent" or "practical" matters of socio-political process and histories without worrying much about historical objectivity and political theory. One manifestation of naive realism is the pre-emotive "socialisation" of realities, ideas and practices, as demonstrated, for example, by the dimensions and the implications of these dimensions of popular participation in African elections -- a process which often spawns an attendant rhetorical over simplification of difficult concepts, this socialisation is disabling as a method of both grasping such historical realities, ideas and rules in all their openness and complexity, and making the ideas tractable to sustainably transparent institutional practice.
Another manifestation of the naive realist approach in Africa is the simple equation of partisan or government elaboration of social and political ideology (for example, the concept of "national selfdetermination, including and up to secession" espoused first by the students movement of Haile Sellasse University and by the current thinking in the transition process in Ethiopia) with the production of ideas, values and goals in civil society. Here, our attention and thought are diverted from the critical destination between, on the one hand, a system of abstract political theory categories as a construct of an explicit rationalisation, a formal conceptualisation and design, and, on the other hand broad and diverse domains of ideology and purposefulness in the plenitude of social experience. We are discouraged from acknowledging the distance and tension between these two spheres of democratisation. Instead, one is led to believe that ideological construction in one sphere is reducible to ideological construction in the other. As the statements: "the constitution must be a creation of the citizenry ..." and "... law should come from the populace rather than palace" suggest, for example, the form of a putative attribution of authorial agency in the making of a democratic constitution to an organisationally underdeveloped, democratically inexperienced and largely, to a civil society that has been deliberately rendered illiterate.
Closely connected with this of naïve realism in existing perspectives of history of conflicts, development and democracy in Africa is the common assumption that the proliferation of social organisations is in and of itself an index of change, transformation, development and democratisation; and that polity will subjectively support such an evolution. The assumption seems plausible. After all, what is more obvious in democratic projects than the goal of increasing the number of social institution's that will build stronger civil societies and that in turn spawns favourable conditions for change and development. Nevertheless, the growing number and diversity of social organisations mean that they have very incompatible political and professional attitudes, norms, visions and capabilities and differing levels of commitment; with own inclinations, concerns and motivations, which polities and societies must take into account.
Bahru’s chapters on ethno-history, economic history, political economy, intellectual, social, political and military history, political violence and environmental and urban history underpin the underlying paradigms of the Renaissance, where humanists stressed the general responsibilities of citizenship and social leadership: an obligation to participate in the political life of the community, signifying change and underscoring continuity; and reflecting the foundations of the new environment for an African version of the Renaissance. The essential contribution of these chapters to our era is not just concerned with the past, but its flexibility and openness to all the possibilities of current events in the continent.
Testimony to living history vs. revolutionary ideology
Such is a case accentuated for change so profoundly articulated that it brings out the
complexity of historical and incumbent social change in its uncertain terms, with few unifying features beyond a common belief that humanity and society could be improved through a new kind of education based on a study of African classics. No wonder, early philosophers were concerned with judgments of taste - objects were judged exquisite when they satisfy a disinterested desire. Art, history, literature, etc., should give the same disinterested satisfaction as natural beauty. Paradoxically, these can accomplish one thing nature cannot – they can offer ugliness and beauty in one object: that the human spirit finds congenial to the exercise of spiritual and intellectual freedom.
The post-Cold War move to self-determination in Africa is not one of simply changing or improving the position and status of ‘nationalities’, but the radical transformation of the values, traditions and institutions of the state itself in their historic and contemporary forms. It is wrestling at once with the question of the self-determination of ethnic communities for which raging conflicts are still going on in the continent and the vision our unity based on equality connected with it. Should it then follow that history must give way to ideology as a basis of our unity? Must our national sentiments and instincts be replaced by nationalist, specifically avant-garde argument and justification? As political parties and groups reject history and tradition in favour of a form of contemporary nationalism based on the global themes of ‘liberation’, ‘democracy’ and ‘socialism’; shouldn’t ordinary citizens fear that, in this light, the issues that the nations pose and seek to settle may be seen more as a feature of a pre-cooked ideology than a historical feature of Africa. When all that is constitutive of its historic identity and unity is subject to rejection and deconstruction, how does Africa become a subject of democratic change, people ask?
This claim of reductionism in approach to Africa’s tradition along with the naivë rationalist criticism that goes with it; is predicated on the polarity that it draws between historically cemented and sedimented values, sentiments and symbols of the tradition, on the one hand, and contemporary ideas and projects of national self- determination, on the other. It is based on a dualism of living history and avant-garde revolutionary ideology. This polarisation is indefensible in its assumption that the two forms of Africa’s experiences are mutually exclusive. Bahru’s uniquely clear portrayal of the polarity between historical and ideological bases of social harmony can serve the critical purpose of evaluating our traditional values and assumptions against the categories and models of modern, libertarian nationalism, and of correcting the limitations of those values. Bahru’s words can help to emphasise the important point that our collective memory and experience as a nation should not constitute a drag on our present capacity for change and development. But this is not possible so long as these construe, as they do, the relation between historical and ideological bases of Africanness in simple opposition terms and attempt to limit national consciousness entirely to the present.
The problem with the portrayal of African tradition as a problem for democratic change, then, is that certain processes, implicitly or explicitly, prevent the tradition from entering into meaningful ‘dialogue’ with contemporary politics. But Africa has folklore, legends and narratives through which its people invest in history with meaning and value. Some feel that they have been subjected to ‘materialist’ criticism from the perspective of ‘scientific’ standards of historical knowledge and truth; as if they were simply epistemological categories. On the other end of the historical-ideological polarity between nationalism in Africa, the politics in currency both at home and among the Diaspora is where heavy emphasis is placed on the differences of communities rather than what they share in common and their unifying historical edifices. This emphasis or over-emphasis really, is the other side of the equally exaggerated, overlyscripted identification of our tradition with oppression of nationalities, in the phrase used by the student movement, ‘a prison of nations’ -- hence, the avant-garde demand for us to be ‘born again’, and ‘born different’. To paraphrase, Jurgen Habermas, indeed, the difference between political struggle for freedom and crime against humanity (in Africa) becomes clear during the change of regimes, in which guerrilla combatants and ‘terrorists’ such as in Rwanda and Burundi, and in the latest edition, Somalia, become the elite rulers of the ‘Africa Renaissance’.
As Society, State and History posits, human history in particular exists beyond the worlds of experience in currency, and that judgmental satisfaction is achieved by contemplating historical notes for their own sakes, as a means of escaping the painful world of daily experience. As tragic as life is for many Africans and indeed Ethiopians, the letters penned by Bahru should not preclude acceptance of the heart-rending with joyous affirmation, the full realisation of which is our past history, what we learn from it and how we plan to use it transform society and polity.