Anthropology and Empire in Post-Italian Ethiopia

Makonnen Desta and the Imagination of an Ethiopian "We-Race"

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to introduce the notion of 'agency' into discussion concerning how Ethiopia is 'imagined'. In it, I address the work of an Ethiopian anthropologist, Makonnen Desta (c. 1910/11-1966), who after the liberation of the country from Italian colonialism (1936-1941) became a member of the imperial government of Ethiopia. He was probably the first western-trained anthropologist to come from Ethiopia.
The story to be told here is part of the history of the imagination of the Ethiopian empire, and had a direct bearing on the formation of counter-imaginations. The incident included a minor encounter between two 'agencies', with a background in anthropological traditions, one external, the other internal. In 1943, the social anthropologist Siegfried Nadel, then a British Military District Commissioner in Eritrea, was sent to Ethiopia. Nadel's task was to explore the possibility of uniting the Tigrignya-speaking parts of Eritrea with the Tigray of Ethiopia. In one of his official meetings in Addis Ababa, Nadel met Makonnen Desta, the Ethiopian Minister of Education. Makonnen Desta had been trained in anthropology in the United States, at Harvard. Although he was probably not precisely informed about Nadel's task, Makonnen Desta responded with an anthropological argument about the unity and uniqueness of an Ethiopian "we-race". The meeting between Nadel and Makonnen Desta was not just an encounter between different individuals, pursuing different political ends and interests. It was also an encounter of different hybrids of imagination based on anthropological arguments.