Page 164 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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Ethiopia and contemporary Ethiopia is not clear because the Abyssinian warlords and
clergy facilitated this confusion to appropriate the history of the ancient mythical
Ethiopia. According to Budge (1928, pp. 120–121), “The translator of the Bible into
Greek identified Kush with Ethiopia . . . and they, like the classical writers... appar-
ently knew nothing of Abyssinia. . . . The name Ethiopia was definitely given to
Abyssinia by those who translated the Bible from Greek into . . . Geez, and the Hebrew
word Kush is translated by . . . Ethiopia.” In reality, as Budge continues,“The descrip-
tions of Ethiopia given by Homer, Herodotus, Diodorus, strabo and Pliny make it quite
clear that they indicated by this name the vast tracts of country [regions] in Asia and
Africa that were inhabited by dark-skinned and black-faced peoples.” The name
Ethiopia derived from the Greek word, “Aithiops”; this name was given by ancient
Greek scholars to indicate that Ethiopia was the region of the black peoples or
“burned-faces” peoples. Historically speaking Abyssinia and Ethiopia are not one and
the same; Abyssinia is part of the Ethiopia.Today Amharas and Tigrayans are credited
for things that are associated with the ancient mythical Ethiopia that was associated
with all black peoples.According to Melbaa, replacing the name Abyssinia by Ethiopia
enabled Habashas to claim that “Ethiopia, as a country and under their rule, existed in
Biblical times and . . . maintained its independence for over 3000 years. On the basis of
this myth . . . they justified their colonization of the Oromo....More than anything
else it is this substitution of Ethiopia for Abyssinia that led the colonized peoples such
as Oromo to reject the term Ethiopian when applied to them” (1988, p. 36). In this
book, I use interchangeably the names Habashas, Abyssinians, and Ethiopians to refer to
Amharas and Tigrayans. A.Wallis Budge, A History of Ethiopia, vols. 1 and 2 (London:
Methuen, 1928); Gadaa Melbaa, Oromia:An Introduction (Khartoum, 1988).
38. See Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1978);Albert Bergesen,“Cycles of Formal Colonial Rule,” Process of the
World System, ed.T. Hopkins and I.Wallerstein (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980);Andre Gun-
der Frank, World Accumulation, 1492–1789.
39. Andre Gunder Frank, ibid.; A. G. Frank, “The Modern World System Revisited:
Rereading Braudel and Wallerstein,” in Civilizations and World Systems, ed. S. K. Sander-
son (Palo Alto, Calif.:Altmaira Press, 1995).
40. See Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
Malik asserts that “the meaning of ‘race’ cannot be confined to a simple definition or
reduced to a single property or relationship. Rather, race rises out of complex contra-
dictions within capitalist society and articulates those contradictions in complex
ways”(p. 265).
41. Howard Winant, Racial Conditions, p. 24.
42. For detailed discussion of these issues, see Benjamin P. Bowser and Raymond G. Hunt,
eds., Impacts of Racism on White Americans, 2nd edition, (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage,
1996), pp. 1–23.
43. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein,Race,Nation,Class:Ambiguous Identities (New
York:Verso, 1991).
44. Ibid., p. 6.
45. Explaining why it is difficult to define race, Malik mentions the following points:“Ge-
neticists have shown that 85 per cent of all genetic variation is between individuals
within the same local population.A further 8 per cent is between local populations or
groups within what is considered to be a major race. Just 7 per cent of genetic varia-
tion is between major races.” Malik, The Meaning of Race, p. 4.
46. Robert Staples,“White Racism, Black Crime, and American Justice:An Application of
the Colonial Model to Explain Crime and Race,” in Sources: Notable Selections in Race
and Ethnicity (Guilford, Conn.: Dushkin/McGraw-Hill, 1998), pp. 280–281.
47. Ibid.