Ethiopia In Theory
@ElleniZeleke
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Professor@ . Author of Ethiopia In Theory. Edit Board of CSSAAME. Born in Ethiopia, raised in Toronto, Guyana, Barbados.
New York
Joined September 2019
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Our beautiful father, Dr Zeleke Bekele passed away last night (January 31st) of Covid related complications. He had many comorbidities. He took his last breaths listening to Tizita music and holding my brother’s hand.
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I listened to the leaked audio of the staff
@UNEthiopia
. Boy oh boy. First it appears the UN staff in Ethiopia pushed their colleagues to be expelled by the ET government. Second, it seems UN policy in Ethiopia is driven by conjecture and paranoid conspiracy theories.
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Just for transparency, let me acknowledge that I initiated this call out and letter, along with my colleagues Mamadou Diouf and Souleymane Bachir Diagne after much discussion.
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Honestly
@TiffanyHaddish
out there denying mass atrocities in Ethiopia is really the dumbest thing ever. If she don’t know then just be quiet. Please cancel her.
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The docs say time has run out. Apparently I’ll be departing these shores in the next few weeks
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Very difficult to watch but necessary. We are so cruel.
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My new monograph Ethiopia In Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016, has a new website to accompany it. Site contains the preface written by Donald Donham, book blurbs, archival photos, some music, and some excerpts from the book:
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I wrote a story about war in the Horn of Africa for
@Chimurenga_SA
that hovers somewhere between past and present, fiction and nonfiction, the essay form and the fable, wax and gold. Please have a read.
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It’s deeply problematic that white scholars relabeled Ge’ez after a nation-state in the 1990s like it’s nothing.
Finally off the press!! Many years in the making! Many people to thank!
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Certain periods of EPRDF rule can be characterised by experimentation with pro-poor development policy for an agrarian society, and that takes creativity and imagination, knowledge of external and internal limits and consideration of the possible.
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My father has Covid and is very ill. I sent a voice note to him and my brother played it with Tizita music in the background. I also gave a lecture today at Harvard school of design. I talked about Tizita as method.
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Love it. A brave anti-war speech in the middle of a hostile crowd!
"ለምንድነው ለመሞት ብቻ ወደፊት የምንለው? አሁን ወጣቶች አይሂዱ ይቁሙ፤ ሽመግሌዎች ይሂዱ። ድንጋይ ያንሱና ሳር ይበጥሱ በሽምግልናም ይቋጩ። አፈሙዙ ይበቃል መፍትሄ የለውም፤እኔም ተዋግቻለው። ከወንድምህ ጋር ነው ሲባል ተመልሻለው።" ዲሽታ ጊና ♥
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@adavari21
, reviews Ethiopia In Theory for Radical Philosophy
@rphilos
. In his review he rethinks solidarity, fraternity and the nationalities question from Ethiopia to Iran. It's an ace review.
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The way that Jamal character
@Channel4News
portrays ethnic hatred as totally reasonable, and that it’s part of his objective duty as a journalist to broadcast it, is hurtful to say the least. Do we spew Hutu power nonsense on the airwaves just because we can?
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Was this tweeted out just after the bombing of Mekelle, Tigray? What is the messaging here
@antonioguterres
@UNEthiopia
: you don’t mind if ENDF keeps bombing civilians on the way to national dialogue? Or are you saying something about who might even be at this national dialogue?
The
@UN
Secretary-General
@antonioguterres
welcomes the Prime Minister’s inauguration remarks prioritizing an inclusive political dialogue involving all segments of the community to resolve the ongoing challenges facing the country.
#UNDay
#UNForAllEthiopians
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In the latest issue of CSSAAME I have organized a Kitabkhana on
@AdomGetachew
book Worldmaking After Empire, with a long Intro essay from myself and in-depth review essays from
@RobbieShilliam
,
@adavari21
Adam Dahl, Michael Collins, and Bob Vitalis.
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Folks didn’t want a developmental state so they got a palace instead. Careful what you ask for.
#Ethiopia
- Gov plans to build a new palace for an eye watering ETB 49b acc to The Reporter. Thousands of residents in the capital expected to be moved to make way for the project. News comes as country’s economy continues to suffer due to a costly civil war in the north.
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To be noted: Kenya (that only just yesterday spoke so eloquently on behalf of the Ukrainians) voted against funding a process of inquiry on war crimes in Ethiopia.
U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said earlier on Thursday that the inquiry should be funded, adding that "whether it's in Ethiopia or anywhere else in the world, human rights violations need to be investigated.
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“Revolution and Rehearsal in the Global South: Unlearning the Archive”
My dialogue with
@AishaAriella
, Bouchra Khalili,
@SohailDaulatzai
,
@BardeAmu
,
@adavari21
,
@Chimurenga_SA
Open-access link (until December):
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Co-Africans, you will not be able to Afro-beats or Afro-politan, or Afro-rise, or even Afro-pessimist your way out of the scale and brutality of the current war in Ethiopia, which begs the question, what have you all been talking about for the past decade?
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Just reread this novel because I am teaching it next year. Better, and more difficult than most books about the Horn of Africa. It’s one of the few novels that takes the region seriously in order to think through its constituent elements.
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New in CSSAAME, co-edited with
@adavari21
🔥🔥🔥Third World Historical🔥🔥🔥
14 original pieces: 5 articles, 2 dialogues, a forum on
#TWH
& 10 experimental writings on
@BCssaame
.
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Most fascinating is the refusal of IOM to engage in resettlement of Tigrayan migrants in the Middle East because they were actually “soldiers” who in the end wished to go to Rwanda to launch guerrilla warfare because Kagame is pro-TPLF. This is what guides UN policy? Mad vibes!
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I think this book is wise and insightful and extremely well written and is not being cited nearly as much as other books on similar topics.
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What is happening in ET is exemplary for Africa. It’s about the dismemberment of a left of centre project, the creation of a vassal state willing to implement the crudest forms of neo-liberal policy & the destruction of a party and population that is connected to an alternative.
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My mind is on the unpredictable situation in the Horn of Africa. Also, is it really ethnic federalism that’s the problem in ET? Isn’t that like saying affirmative action is responsible for racism?
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One can only conclude that the catastrophe of the war in Ethiopia is driven as much by incompetency than anything else. What does
@antonioguterres
think?
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The past two years have been brutal mostly because the ET war turned out to be so brutal and you wonder about all that time you spent cavorting with people you thought were peace loving friends. I prefer the company of donkeys these days.
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This is the most accessible talk I have given about the crisis of the Ethiopian state. With the happy crew
@africasacountry
. Please have a listen. I start at the 17th minute.
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In the past I have been invited to speak at the
@PeoplesForumNYC
. I hope all the academics I know boycott them going forward. This is the left version of lying enough times to establish reality because truth really doesn’t matter.
.
@PeoplesForumNYC
why tf are you giving your platform to those who whitewash and justify the horrific abuses committed by the Eritrean and Ethiopian regimes?
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Wait, one jails the entire opposition that was responsible for leading the protests that led to a democratic opening, then one starts a war against the only other opposition force in the country and somehow there is dialogue and progress? What is this “reasonable” analysis?
#EthiopiaElections
Yes, flawed (Oromo opposition boycott) n unfortunate context (Tigray tragedy)
But Kudos to
@NEBEthiopia
's relentlessness - I had wondered, why not quit? but they didn't!
To build on this minimal legacy, imperative to engage in win-win thinking and dialogue!
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I’ll ask it again. Shouldn’t the brutality of the war in Ethiopia make the scholars on Africa pause? What are you really saying or not saying that this is happening today?
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Tuesday, Nov 1st at LSE, talking about the Third World Historical. Join us.
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To be clear the paranoia and conspiracy theory is there to justify the war in the “north” as the UN staff who got their colleagues expelled like to say. Wild stuff.
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Last two chapters of this book are important for rethinking what solidarity might look like across these continents, given the complicated ways the name "Ethiopia" has been mobilised as both a generic and specific concept across multiple geographies.
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Academics that I know are members of
@Blacks4Peace
. I have to ask if you condone this nonsensical report by
@hoa_pals
. Do let me know
@darkfinance
,
@madanboukman
, and others. By this logic, an international anti-apartheid movement for SA would be US intervention and imperial.
@Blacks4Peace
@hoa_pals
Your report is based only on newspaper accounts, you don't cite one scholar from the region, you don't take seriously the politics of the place but reduce it to a story about American imperialism. Mass atrocities are reduced to being a narrative. You are disconnected from reality
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I just finished watching
@FayaDayi
by
@jessybeshir
. It’s the best film I have seen coming out of the Horn of Africa region. Not only is every frame startling in its beauty, every frame is also a philosophical question about spirit, everyday reality and cash crop agriculture. 🙌🏾
This documentary, Faya Dayi is a work of art and combines every breathtakingly beautiful frame with social commentary in the most extraordinary way. Made by
@jessybeshir
#FayaDayi
#Ethiopia
#Merkhanafilms
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In other words, lets us commit mass violence on our own terms. But FDI, welcome, welcome.
#Ethiopia
is a sovereign and free country. We demand no foreign country's interference to solve our own issues. Leave
#Ethiopian
issue for
#Ethiopian
.
#EUrespectEthiopianSovereignty
#CondemnTerroristTPLF
@EU_Commission
@UNHCREthiopia
@WFP
@WFPChief
@WFP_Ethiopia
@USAID
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The thing about the
@NewYorker
piece is that he’s calling everyone in ET a monkey as much as Abiy! He’s saying you and your ilk and the whole lot of Africans are a strange barbaric people with no real politics. Nothing at stake in war but your barbarity.
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That New Yorker article about ET (that I will not link to) just reads as apologia for war crimes. I guess that’s the new policy more generally. Make little Rutos for all of Africa.
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“On hearing such tales, my mother said she could not believe such things could have been done by our people; and we were unable to draw any other moral except this: that for the conquering soldier every land is enemy territory, even his own.”
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The brightest literary and art stars of the Ethio-American diaspora engaged in whataboutism in the face of famine, and sexual violence as a weapon of war. My Toronto diaspora homies were resolutely anti-war from the get go. I think this is about training beyond the university.
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What is Ethiopic and who speaks it? I believe only the author of this text book and his 10 academic peers do.
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What kind of government reverses development indicators? Who prefers the abstract glory of war-based nationalism vs mass poverty reduction? Who prefers faux elections and adopting the rhetoric of CIVICUS instead of studying the real needs of their country? Weeey Addis Ababa.
Not all of you will remember 1984, and the horrendous famine that killed a million Ethiopians. Those who do would prefer to forget it. But it's happening again, for the same criminal reasons, and once more the world is turning a blind eye.
My column.
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What’s is wrong with this dude? In the upcoming national elections, there will be no elections in 97 out 547 seats because of war or security issues. There are no alternative facts.
Many of the western media are describing
#Ethiopia
as “a war-torn country”.
That’s inaccurate.
We know there’s a war in Tigray and ethnic conflicts in several regions. But this is a big country with 115 million people and for the most, it’s peaceful.
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In 2015 I got to present my work on the 1960s student movement in Ethiopia while in Ethiopia, in Africa Hall at the ECA. So many of the founders and practitioners of the movement were present that day. We had so much fun.
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Pan-Africanism can mean nearly anything these days, including supporting xenophobic policy in South Africa.
#AbiyAhmed
's officials bestowed a VIP welcome at Bole International Air Port in the capital
#AddisAbaba
to a
#SouthAfrican
who is known for issuing publicly "
#Africans
out of
#SouthAfrica
" ultimatums. He is welcomed as Pan-Africanist as part of
#Ethiopia
's desperate effort 1/2
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Ethiopia in Theory is less a book about Ethiopia and more book that offers a method for thinking about the complexities of leftist traditions in Africa. It avoids nostalgia for some previous generation of anti-imperialist who got it right but nor is it a morality tale.
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The instrumentalisation of friendship and the manipulation of truth even at the micro-level seems to be both consequence and contributor to war time conflict in the Horn of Africa. What is the relationship between personal integrity and political integrity?
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As I see it, the popularity of the war in Tigray scapegoats an entire geo-political-economic situation onto one group of people, and one part of one political party but offers no solution except the elimination of a perceived "evil" force.
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Vaccines for all, health for all, free the people, free the land.
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But some of the leaders in the organizations that signed this letter have been pro-war.
Call for Peace: More than two dozens local civil society orgs call for cessation of hostilities, deescalate conflicts and war propaganda in
#Ethiopia
This is the first time a collective of local civil society orgs have come together to call for peace.
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In this talk I use my own research on the Ethiopian student movement of the 1960s and 70s to ask what is the role of the intellectual in the context of war.
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Not sure it's useful to think about the ET political crisis in terms of who better feels the other's pain. My sense is that people kill in the name of justice and not because they have lost empathy for the other. Righteousness is a powerful drug.
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Despite claims to a long and glorious history contemporary Ethiopian leaders, intellectuals, and elites seem incapable of understanding their own history beyond cycles of violence and revenge. So there is no constituency capable of stopping the ongoing violence in the country.
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RIP Kamau Brathwaite
From Arrivants:
it was all so sudden
it was all so very sudden
when your spirit said
I am going away
I am gone
may your journey now be straight going
may your road be a peaceful one
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I teach one class tomorrow and then I don’t teach again for 16 months. But also I have been teaching for 5 years straight. Can’t wait to only read and write.
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Safaricom shareholding structure is Government of Kenya (35 per cent), Vodacom (35 per cent), Vodafone (5 per cent) and free float (25 per cent).
Ethiopia, you were told to open up telecoms to non-state actors only to find telecoms and mobile banking are owned by another state.
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I am 99% sure that many of disinformation campaigns surrounding the war in Ethiopia are being supported by organizations associated with
@vijayprashad
and Roy Singham, Prashad’s billionaire funder who also recently defunded New Frame in South Africa while messing with NUMSA.
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Out now, now and 30% off if bought directly from the publisher
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Please don’t tell me about Sankara and Nkrumah when right in front of you, you have nothing to say about how imperialism is destroying a country in Africa right now.
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If Black Agenda Report had the same bad politics on say, for example, Palestine, as it does on most things to do with Africa, y'all would take no time at all to dissociate yourself from said organisation. But since no one knows anything about Africa (states) it's all good.
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Remember that awful article that
@JulieMehretu
@whitneymuseum
had posted denying atrocities in Tigray in the name of Black Lives Matter? This is our collective response to that article with a side story of how Policy Options tried to censor us.
#Canada
and the Atrocities in
#Tigray
,
#Ethiopia
: Scholars Respond to Policy Options
Thanks
@africaarguments
for your integrity; co-authors
@dwebsterbu
@safiyaaaay
@ElleniZeleke
for your courage & endurance.
@IRPP
#PolicyOptions
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In some ET circles people now use the English word "narrative" to describe political positions different than their own. Reality has ceased to exist as something independent of "narrative", even for the dying. Woe to the storytellers.
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@TiffanyHaddish
You need to stop posting articles from medium and actually read work from scholars that are vetted by peer review or read work from credible journalists on the ground. The fact that you don’t even know what constitutes proper research standards is what is embarrassing here.
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People told me that this was about reform. To be patient. That rape was not political nor specifically a weapon of war. World famous feminists said this.
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If you want to know why AU mediation is failing in Ethiopia, read this.
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I see
@Blacks4Peace
is being quoted and promoted by stalwarts in Canadian rightwing foreign policy circles. I am sure they are very proud. Some of us scholars from the Horn wrote a response to Anna:
The Black Alliance for Peace issues a statement on US Policy in HoA: “The fact is that Africa is underdeveloped and destabilized precisely because of centuries of European colonialism and decades of U.S. and Western European neocolonialism.”
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The war has nothing to say about poverty. But it does have something to say about land privatization. That too is a vision of what an agrarian political economy should like. It would be hard to argue that its pro-poor, except as trickle down economics.
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Because in Ethiopia up is down, black is white, left is right, capitalists are saviours, imperialists are anti-imperialists, truth is lies and so on and so forth: Moment In Between The Rest (To Curve An Ache).
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This podcast from NPR really feels like a collective effort to shed light on the ongoing civil wars in Ethiopia. Take a listen. It features words and commentary from myself, Sarah Vaughan and many others.
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Anyways, if this Ethiopia conflict throws all of our political categories into disarray while hundreds of thousands of civilians go hungry because of a state sanctioned siege, and we all can do is scramble over our concepts,
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We get an acknowledgment here that getting rid of EPRDF was supported by the international community in order to bring “something more liberal to Ethiopia”. But since the end of WWII the EPRDF was the only regime that meaningfully improved basic development indicators.
#EthiopiaTooBigToFail
What Role for the International Community in the Tigray Crisis?
Thanks to the speakers and all the attendees!
With G. Carbone ISPI, A. de Waal
@WorldPeaceFdtn
,
@TheodoreMurphy
@ecfr
, L. Muthoni Wanyeki
@OpenSociety
Watch it here:
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@Blacks4Peace
@hoa_pals
Your report is based only on newspaper accounts, you don't cite one scholar from the region, you don't take seriously the politics of the place but reduce it to a story about American imperialism. Mass atrocities are reduced to being a narrative. You are disconnected from reality
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I saw someone on here calling themselves the Miskin Liberation Front. Lol. That’s brilliant.
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Few actors in the ET political space had the patience or wisdom to have an honest conversation about the complicated process of building pro-poor democratic institutions in an agrarian society, and the ways that entails negotiation and compromise with internal and external actors
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You may hate the federal system in Ethiopia and I suppose you have every right to do so, but you can’t just rewrite 27 years of EPRDF rule as darkness. Contradictory, yes, messy, sure, inching towards neo-liberalism, absolutely! But darkness, nah! See article 👇🏾
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Exhausting. What really is at stake for anybody? For how long can this go on? Where is the substantive anti-war movement internal to Ethiopia?
Authorities in
#Ethiopia
's Afar region staged an elaborate attempt to push Addis Ababa's claim that Tigrayan forces are using child soldiers. They invited
@BBCAfrica
to interview several teenagers and their responses were coached by a spokesman.
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It should understood that most leftists could not even come up with conceptual vocabulary to engage this war and the destruction of a country. Some even cheered on SAP 2.0 like it was the definition of sovereignty. That’s how weak left internationalism is.
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Alternatively there is a claim that 27 years of TPLF dominated EPRDF rule is what inevitably led to massive and violent resentment. Hence the popularity of the war on Tigray. But that’s reductionist. Even the language of resentment has to be learned.
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Even the babies know what books they should be reading.
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Structural adjustment 2.0 is being implemented all over the continent.
Here’s my initial reaction to the conditions attached to Zambia’s imf deal. The conditions are grossly anti-poor. Sad to see the role that Zambian civil society played in giving credence to the IMF during this process
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I am so happy that I was given permission to use this painting, entitled MAHZOUM - DEFEAT, from Hamed Abdalla as the cover of the paperback version of my book. Egyptian modernist painter on a book called Ethiopia in Theory.
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What is the connection between being so thrilled to laud Africans, who apparently made all kinds of worlds in the past, and having so little to say about African world’s breaking apart today? Ethiopia, Sudan, Mali, Chad, etc.
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Instead of reading the infantile Black Agenda Report and B4Peace on the Horn of Africa, read the many articles in the
@theelephantinfo
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Forum on
#Ethiopia
in Theory. With reviews from
@samar42
,
@AdomGetachew
,
@theafrabian
. And an author response that includes shoutouts to
@Chimurenga_SA
.
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Our father was very old, he was very beautiful, he lived a most generous and gorgeous life. He liked to say he started off as an urchin boy in Addis Ababa, cried his way into Teferi Mekonnen school, and then got scholarships to high school in Cairo and then Bowdoin College.
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I had a wonderful conversation with
@thiamm
@NewBooksAfrica
about my book. Check it.
Elleni Centime Zeleke
@ElleniZeleke
on her new book Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016 (
@haymarketbooks
@BrillPublishing
) in conversation with Madina Thiam
@thiamm
for the
@NewBooksAfrica
@NewBooksNetwork
#podcast
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What so many admired most about him was that he could move with fluency between a Ge’ez text, a Langston Hughes poem and a text from uncle Marx (as he would say).
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MENA is def the most irritating of the terms. Please don’t use it. You are basically just saying “the region of the supposedly light skinned peoples of Africa”. There is no justification for that term.
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The disinformation campaign is exhausting all of us. What can we do? It’s more Trump than Trump.
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Our father has been a most talented father. Rigorous, disciplined, and as such very playful. Our entire intellectual disposition, the way we ask questions has been inherited from him. He always said thank you at the end of a phone call. Give thanks, indeed.
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Since we now know the other Twitter troll, Jeff Pearce was getting paid by the ET government, I'll venture to say Ann Garrison is being offered material incentives.
Girl. You are truly an idiot & you have/show absolutely no desire to remedy that. Why is that?
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