by Mesfin Woldemariam
Professor of Geography
Ethiopia has always been a land of mystery that is still unfolding.
In the 16 century, Europeans wrote of “the land of Lord Prestor John” who was “the sole Christian ruler in a heathen continent”.
The land of Prestor John was believed to have abundant agricultural and mineral wealth. This land was rich in gold and important in the international trade of time. It had fat sheep with six horns, and “with smooth hair and such broad tail that it dragged it behind, it weighed about one third of the whole sheep.”
Even later, after relatively more was known about the country and the people, the exaggeration of the wealth content continued. Bermudez, wrote to his king pleading to “secure” Ethiopia for Portugal and for “the Holy Mother Church.”
In order to persuade the king of Portugal, the priest wrote “as far as worldly affairs also there would be such profit there that neither Peru with its gold, nor India with its commerce, would be superior to it.”
When Edward gibbon wrote his oft quoted sentence that “encompassed on all side by the enemies of their religion, the Aethiopians slept near a thousand years, forgetful of the world by whom they were forgotten,” he had in mind Islam and the western perception of it.
He was not for instance, thinking of the likes of Bermudez, nor of the fact that Islam is as much Ethiopian as Christianity. It was in 1948 that the British scholar, Margery Perham, wrote: “Truth is an elusive query in Ethiopian studies, historical or contemporary.”
But she did recognize some truth when she wrote …..the kingdom which was the forerunner of the modern Ethiopia first enters history, not gradually from the modest beginnings of a barbarian tribe, but as an established power sharing in the commerce and culture of the ancient world.
A famous American cultural geographer, Carl O. Sauer, writing in 1952 said, “Archeaology has never pointed a finger at Ethiopia as a cradle of civilization, but this (that Ethiopia is a great centre of origin of cultivated plants) and other biological evidence does so, and very strongly.” Eventually archaeology did point a finger at Ethiopia.
Hardly three decades later, with discovery of the Lucy, or Dinkinesh, her Ethiopian name, Ethiopia has become, as far as present paleoanthropological evidence could establish, the origin of man’s ancestor. In Lucy beginnings of Human kind, the authors describe Lucy as being “approximately 3.5m yrs old.
She is the oldest, most complete, best preserved skeleton of any erect –walking human ancestor that has ever been found.” Archeological and historical studies, too, are gradually uncovering more and more of Ethiopia’s past.
Furthermore, Martin Bernal, the author of Black Athena” The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilizations, has charted a new historical perspective that places Ethiopia as the centre of ancient history.
By all accounts, Ethiopia is one of the oldest states in the world. Its long and almost uninterrupted history of independence is full of valiant sacrifices against all types of forces which one after another attempted to dominate it.
The climax came when Ethiopian forces crushed an incomparably superior and technologically advanced European power Italy, in 1896 at the Battle of Adowa. Fascist Italy revisited Ethiopia in 1935 and occupied most of the country until 1941, although Ethiopian patriots were resisting this in the various mountains of the country.
Ethiopia’s commanding position with regard to the red sea and Nile valley has always attracted external powers that wish to control the region.
