Captive of Fabricated Continuity: Myth, Empire, and the Making of Modern Ethiopia

by Ghidewon Abay Asmerom

Captive of Fabricated Continuity: Myth, Empire, and the Making of Modern Ethiopia
How Late-Nineteenth-Century Conquest Was Recast as Ancient Civilization

Ethiopia is routinely framed by its current leadership as a state that is “a prison of geography” for its landlocked position and volatile regional environment. Such explanations obscure a deeper and more decisive constraint. Ethiopia is not a prisoner of geography but captive to a historically fabricated narrative of continuity that retroactively projects antiquity, unity, and civilizational legitimacy onto a modern imperial state consolidated during the late nineteenth century. By selectively appropriating the legacy of the Aksumite kingdom and elevating Solomonic mythology into state orthodoxy, Ethiopian historiography marginalized or delegitimized numerous indigenous polities and political systems. A comparative analysis of Yugoslavia, Turkey, and China demonstrates that states founded on mythologized continuity rather than negotiated plural histories are prone to recurring crises of legitimacy and political fragmentation. Ethiopia’s contemporary conflicts are thus best understood not as consequence of geography, but as the structural consequences of historical fabrication institutionalized as national truth.¹

1. Geography as Explanation and Alibi

Ethiopia is not a country trapped by its geography. Some Prosperity Party apologists and some Ethiopian academics want to point to its landlocked status, its location in a conflict-prone region, and its lack of direct access to maritime trade routes as enduring handicaps that shape its political and economic trajectory.² While these factors matter, they function increasingly as explanatory shortcuts that divert attention from deeper historical processes.

Ethiopia’s persistent crises are rooted not primarily in geography but in a state-sanctioned historical narrative that has hardened into orthodoxy. The modern Ethiopian state defines itself through a teleological story of ancient continuity that collapses centuries of rupture, conquest, and political plurality into a single civilizational arc.³ Geography constrains material possibilities; history, when institutionalized as ideology, structures legitimacy, citizenship, and power. It is in this latter domain that Ethiopia’s most enduring constraints are found.⁴

2. Empire Formation in the Age of the Scramble for Africa

The territorial and political form of modern Ethiopia emerged during the late nineteenth century, at the height of the Scramble for Africa. Menelik II’s expansion between the 1880s and 1900 incorporated vast territories to the south, east, and west through military conquest, forced tribute, and administrative restructuring.⁵ These campaigns were not peripheral to Ethiopian history; they were constitutive acts that produced the modern state.

Scholars have demonstrated that Ethiopia’s expansion shared structural similarities with European colonial projects elsewhere in Africa, including surplus extraction, legal hierarchization, and cultural domination.⁶ The absence of European rule did not negate the imperial character of the Ethiopian state; it merely rendered imperial domination endogenous. Ethiopia thus functioned as what Christopher Clapham terms an “empire-state,” deriving authority from conquest rather than consent.⁷

This historical moment created an acute legitimacy problem. A state assembled through recent conquest could not rely on coercion alone. It required a deeper temporal justification, one that could transform empire into inheritance. That justification was supplied through the appropriation of antiquity.

3. Aksum and the Construction of Historical Continuity

Central to Ethiopia’s claim of antiquity is its asserted succession from the Aksumite kingdom, a major Red Sea power that flourished between the first and seventh centuries CE.⁸ Aksum’s achievements in trade, coinage, architecture, and early Christianity are well documented.⁹ What is not supported by evidence is the claim of uninterrupted political continuity between Aksum and the modern Ethiopian state.

Between Aksum’s decline and the emergence of the Solomonic dynasty in 1270 lies nearly six centuries of political fragmentation, religious pluralism, and shifting centers of power.¹⁰ This rupture was bridged not through historical documentation but through narrative construction. The Kebra Nagast, a fourteenth-century court text, supplied a forged Solomonic genealogy linking imperial authority to biblical antiquity.¹¹

Over time, this dynastic myth migrated from court ideology to national historiography. Myth ceased to function as symbolic tradition and instead became institutionalized as historical fact. As Prasenjit Duara observes in a broader theoretical context, such narratives subordinate evidence to teleology, rescuing history for the nation by transforming it into destiny.¹² In Ethiopia, this transformation redefined conquest as restoration and difference as deviation.

4. Silencing Plural Pasts and Political Alternatives

The monopolization of antiquity required the marginalization of alternative histories. Recognition of multiple sovereign pasts would have exposed the modern empire’s contingent origins. Consequently, Ethiopian historiography relegated numerous polities to the margins of national history.

Kingdoms such as Kafa, Hadiya, Yifat, and Adal possessed structured political institutions, regional trade networks, and diplomatic histories.¹³ Islamic sultanates, particularly Yifat and Adal, were central actors in the Horn of Africa between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, yet they were recast as interruptions rather than coequal political formations.¹⁴

Equally significant was the exclusion of non-monarchical systems of governance. The Oromo Gadaa system, extensively documented by Asmarom Legesse, constituted a constitutional order characterized by rotating leadership, age-grade representation, and codified law.¹⁵ Its dismissal as merely cultural rather than political was ideological rather than analytical. By denying Gadaa recognition as a legitimate form of statehood, imperial conquest was reframed as civilizational necessity.

5. Comparative Perspectives on Myth and State Legitimacy

5.1 Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia promoted a narrative of South Slavic unity that deferred rather than resolved competing historical memories. When central authority weakened, suppressed histories re-emerged violently.¹⁶ Ethiopia exhibits a comparable pattern in which unresolved historical denial resurfaces during periods of state crisis.

5.2 Turkey

Modern Turkey constructed a nationalist narrative emphasizing ancient Anatolian roots while denying the historical presence and political legitimacy of Armenians and Kurds. This selective historiography produced enduring instability.¹⁷ Ethiopia’s Solomonic narrative performs a similar legitimizing function through exclusion.

5.3 China

China also claims ancient continuity but differs in its partial acknowledgment of ethnic plurality within a civilizational framework.¹⁸ Although politically constrained, this acknowledgment has facilitated more flexible integration than narratives insisting on singular origin. Ethiopia’s failure to pair antiquity with plural inclusion has produced sharper centrifugal pressures.

6. Conclusion

Ethiopia’s contemporary crises cannot be adequately explained by geography alone. They are rooted in a historical narrative that equates empire with nationhood and mythology with legitimacy. This narrative has structured political power, constrained citizenship, and transformed political disagreement into existential confrontation.

Historical demystification is therefore a political necessity. Ethiopia must acknowledge its modern origins as a state formed through late nineteenth-century conquest over multiple societies, each with its own historical legitimacy. Only by replacing fabricated continuity with negotiated history can Ethiopia escape the prison of its invented past.¹⁹

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Notes

1. Christopher Clapham, Controlling Space in Ethiopia (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), 9–14.
2. Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1991, 2nd ed. (Oxford: James Currey, 2001), 1–5.
3. Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 1–7.
4. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 27–30.
5. Marcus, History of Ethiopia, 88–117.
6. Zewde, History of Modern Ethiopia, 60–87.
7. Clapham, Controlling Space, 9–14.
8. Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilization of Late Antiquity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 1–5.
9. Munro-Hay, Aksum, 205–210.
10. Munro-Hay, Aksum, 217–223.
11. The Kebra Nagast, trans. E. A. Wallis Budge (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), esp. chaps. 94–101. Pagination varies by edition.
12. Duara, Rescuing History, 27–30.
13. Mohammed Hassen, The Oromo of Ethiopia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 25–41.
14. Ulrich Braukämper, Islamic History and Culture in Southern Ethiopia (Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 2002), 53–78.
15. Asmarom Legesse, Gadaa: Three Approaches to the Study of African Society (New York: Free Press, 1973), 1–9, 245–252.
16. Sabrina P. Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 3–12, 397–402.
17. Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 181–189.
18. Duara, Rescuing History, 55–67.
19. Clapham, Controlling Space, 203–210.

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Bibliography

• Braukämper, Ulrich. Islamic History and Culture in Southern Ethiopia. Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 2002.
• Clapham, Christopher. Controlling Space in Ethiopia: Power and Landscape in Historical Perspective. Oxford: James Currey, 2002.
• Duara, Prasenjit. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
• Hassen, Mohammed. The Oromo of Ethiopia: A History 1570–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
• Legesse, Asmarom. Gadaa: Three Approaches to the Study of African Society. New York: Free Press, 1973.
• Marcus, Harold G. A History of Ethiopia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
• Munro-Hay, Stuart. Aksum: An African Civilization of Late Antiquity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991.
• Ramet, Sabrina P. The Three Yugoslavias: State-Building and Legitimation, 1918–2005. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
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• Zürcher, Erik J. Turkey: A Modern History. London: I.B. Tauris, 2004.