Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Food Matters: The Place of Development in Building the Postwar Ethiopian State, 1941-1974*

2009; Boston University; Volume: 42; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

2326-3016

Getnet Bekele,

Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development

Development, once subservient to the core ideology of revolutionary democracy espoused by Ethiopia's ruling party since coming to power in May 1991, is poised to take center-stage on the national political scene at the dawn of the country's third millennium.1 The notion of the developmental as propounded of late by the incumbent government (and doubtless triggered by the fallout from the extremely controversial May 2005 elections) has set in motion a new round of debate regarding the future of Ethiopia's politics and the democratization process at virtually every level of society.2 On a much larger scale too, recent concerns about international terrorism, widespread poverty, pandemics, and the surge in postcolonial conflicts in Africa in the last half-century have forced scholars to consider and power relations more seriously and from new perspectives. This study attempts to understand Ethiopia's history by focusing on the three and a half decades that followed the short-lived Italian occupation of the country (1936-41). What circumstances made and sustained as a relevant theme in Ethiopian history? Why has the concept changed over time, and how important was it in mediating power relations in postwar Ethiopia? These are important questions that do not lead to easy answers. Throughout its history, in Ethiopia has never been a linear process nor has it been the exclusive monopoly of any one group or institution. The fact that there may be different versions of the experience in the country over time and across space ensures that any attempt to write its history will be an extremely challenging exercise. Notwithstanding those challenges, the present study attempts to explore Ethiopia's history as it unfolded at the scene of national political power, which was only one of the many places where that concept has been appropriated, inscribed, and practiced by different groups of social actors for different purposes. This article maintains that from the very beginning, the notion of development offered Ethiopia's postwar regimes a viable platform for consolidating power in a polity that was in constant change and transformation. The paper seeks to demonstrate that the most enduring theme in Haile Selassie's thinking about has been food, which for him had a pragmatic relevance both in social and political terms as he struggled to build a national state in the ruins of an Italian empire in the Horn. The Etymology of a Concept: The Origin of Development as an Organizing Theme in a Liberated Country In colonial Africa, ideas about evolved in the wake of declining European empires, and development's history is intimately associated with decolonization and the power politics of the post-World War ? period.3 And Ethiopia was a tabula rasa for by the end of the Italian occupation in May 1941. The Italians were certainly the most ambitious empire builders in the region. The empire the Italians sought to build and rule- the Africa Orientale Italiana (AOI)stretched from the Indian Ocean coast of Somalia in the south to the British colony of the Sudan in the north, before it crumbled in May 1941. It was an expansive empire whose size dwarfed all the states that the Horn of African has seen anytime before or since. The Italians had smaller colonies in the region before, but it was their successful conquest of the independent state of Ethiopia and its incorporation of the older colonies that created the sizeable AOI empire in the Horn in 1936.4 Size was not the most defining feature of Italy's colonization. Rather, it was the degree to which the fascist state attempted to micromanage colonial administration that distinguished the AOI from the majority of the European colonies in Africa. In practice, however, the Italian colonial experience in Ethiopia was not markedly different from that in the rest of Africa, except for its duration of only five years. …