Tigray
Kaieteur News – Ethiopian country continues to enjoy a legendary place in Guyanese / Caribbean imagination. From Bob Marley to Buju Banton, the homeland of Emperor Haile Selassie, he has been presented as a kind of Zion, one to which Afro-Caribbean people and a much wider Rastafarian heritage might someday return. As Buju laments in his song, ‘Til I’m Laid to Rest’:
“Working 7 to 7 but I’m still cashless,
Bless all the food on my table Massa God,
Holler for the needy and shelter less,
Ethiopia awaits all princes and princesses. ”
Marley, for his part, in his anthem ‘War,’ would immortalize Selassie’s groundbreaking 1936 speech to the League of Nations. While his poetic mantra ‘Tan …’ is well known, the Emperor covered in far more prosaic but still powerful terms, the dire humanitarian crisis facing his country in the aftermath of Italy’s aggressive behavior:
“I pray to Almighty God that He may spare the nations of the terrible sufferings that have just inflicted upon my people, and the chiefs who come with me here have been horrific witnesses. It is my duty to inform the Governments assembled in Geneva, responsible as they are for the lives of millions of men, women and children, of the deadly dangers, which threaten them, by describing to them the fate, and suffered by Ethiopia. The Italian Government has not just fought warriors. Above all, it has attacked populations far from hostility, in order to intimidate and annihilate them. ”
The thing is, Ethiopia of the Rastafarian imagination has not existed, if it ever did, for a very long time. After World War II, Ethiopia disappeared for decades under Selassie’s rule, even as their personal mythos flourished through the spread of Rastafarian philosophy and the worldwide aesthetic popularity of Reggae. The more obscure the reality of Ethiopia under his government, which continued until his death in 1974, the more powerful the mythical Ethiopia grew in the global imagination, that is, until the unprecedented famine of the mid-1980s. This is despite even a decade-long Independence war waged (and won) by Eritrea and the post-Selassie revolution and military reigns.
The 1980s famine replaced the image of regal Haile Selassie in full traditional imperial costume with a photograph of a hungry four-year-old girl, Birhan Woldu, already wrapped in a funeral shroud by her father, dying of starvation. That photograph would be used to galvanize international aid to Ethiopia, saving hundreds of thousands of children like Birhan (and adults too) from starvation. Birhan, whose journey had begun in her home state of Tigray, would go on to improve, a symbol of hope of what was possible with the right international humanitarian focus in a troubled part of the world.
Today, however, Tigray – once devastated by famine – is now increasingly destroyed by war, a war that has battled to compete for global warning in plague time, the COVID-19 pandemic and the downturn economic that has accompanied it.
Al-Jazeera’s report, published yesterday, on the conflict that has been fighting between the Ethiopian government and an armed insurgency group called The Tigray Liberation Front since November last year, sums up how desperate the conflict itself is , and the dangerous turn it has taken with the government attacking the free press to try to deal with the conflict:
“The closure of the northern region and a government-imposed blackout affecting the internet, mobile phones and landlines have made access and assessment to aid agencies dealing with the evolving humanitarian crisis remarkable of difficult. It has also made it impossible for media seeking access to investigate artillery attacks on populated areas, deliberate targeting and massacres of civilians, biased murders, looting and widespread rape, including by suspected Eritrean troops. “
Almost a hundred years after Selassie’s speech to the United Nations, and forty years after the great famine, the great nation of the imagination, Ethiopia, is again under serious threat as the conflict at Tigray – just three months old – is threatening to spiral out of control, at the worst possible time, one where not only is there an unprecedented global pandemic, but where the kind of economic resources organized in the 1980s may not be possible now. In his song, Buju laments that there is no peace in the West and that “Only Ethiopia protects me from the cold.” That’s an Ethiopian myth – the reality is that Ethiopia may need all the protection it can get from the West.