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At the end of 2010, I took a trip to Ethiopia to visit my family. At the time, my parents worked in Bole, the commercial centre of Addis Ababa. Being only 16, my movements were more or less regulated by my parents, which meant that I would travel with them into the city each day, after which it was the extent of my curiosity and creativity (and pocket money) that determined what I did until evening, when I would head back to our house on the outskirts of the city. Slowly, interactions with the staff at a nearby cafe, just a few hundred meters from the building where my family worked, became routine.
Over the two months that I was in Ethiopia, with much of this time spent in Addis Ababa, we spent most of our lunch breaks together, hanging out on the steps of the cafe, sharing stories to pass the time. One day, the conversation of our relationship to ‘Ethiopia’, as a national identity, came up. It’s important to note that I was raised in the Oromo diaspora, a community that, in the years my mother and I migrated to Australia, was made up mostly of political refugees who fled the country after the adoption of the “Transitional Period Charter of Ethiopia” and the official establishment of a transitional government.
This eventually led to the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) monopolizing power within the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), a process that resulted in the isolation of those seeking political power within the EPRDF through the ballot. Given the size and economic importance of the Oromia region, it was the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), amongst others, that became a key target of political violence, creating political communities in exile exactly like the one that I grew up in.
I inherited a different definition of Ethiopia, coloured by memories and experiences of violence and displacement that informed my relationship to the state as a place of unbelonging for those who shared my identity. The day that the conversation with these two new friends wandered into political territory, we all engaged passionately, striving to reflect the extent of both our personal experiences and hopes for our country. They found my reflections to be overly nostalgic and antagonistic towards the country’s future. Unconcerned for the good of the future. I found their insistence that we shared a national identity to be inaccurate and offensive. We agreed on little, and I found it exhilarating.
That evening, I was restlessly anticipating the opportunity to tell my mother about what I thought was the most exciting experience of my trip to date. In recounting the story, I almost gave my mother a heart attack. Angry, afraid, and in shock, my mother warned me sternly against ever engaging in such conversation in public again. She asked me many questions about who these men were, how I knew them, and if we’d ever had such conversations before. What I was blind to, and what was the daily lived experience of my parents, was that Addis Ababa, primarily but not exclusively, was a heavily surveilled city, the State looking for the people doing exactly what I found myself doing that day – discussing the political reality of our country. Thereafter, I was careful, out of curiosity more than fear (being 16 with a high risk tolerance will do that), and refrained from fully-fledged conversations, opting for quiet enquiry when the opportunity presented itself. Although our conversation never veered down the road of politics again, I continued to visit my friends every day and remember rushing to say a heartfelt goodbye on the day I was due to fly back to Australia.
For this piece, I will centre the discussion on Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, as opposed to extending the conversation to other parts of the country which exist with their own nuances and political realities, requiring more space for analysis than I have here. I share the introductory anecdote to forward the idea that, in Ethiopia, to nurture spaces of connection, community-building, and care, we must first invest in collective repair of the damage wrought by decades of state surveillance that has defined the range and breadth of relational life the city space can hold, and from the legacy of what can only be defined as settler colonialism. ‘Where’, figuratively and literally, can this process of repair take place? I argue that it must take place in Finfinnee, geographically the same location as Addis Ababa, but sociologically and historically, different, and with a capacity unique unto itself to ground and lead us to new political possibilities.
In 1886, Menelik II conquered the lands that were then known as Finfinnee and were primarily inhabited by the Tulama Oromo. As it took on its new identity as the “new flower” (the meaning of Addis Ababa), as both a military barracks for the expansion of Menelik’s empire and as the accumulation point for capital extracted throughout the process of the Ethiopian state’s consolidation, Finfinnee lost something, an essence. Regaining connection with it, not just for the Oromo, but for all who inhabit the Ethiopian state, is vital if we are to become free of cyclical violence, political domination and mass poverty. Fundamentally, this perspective is concerned with the functions that Finfinnee held space for, which were specific to the Oromo’s indigenous ways of organising society and were destroyed to make room for the functions of the modern nation-state’s capital city. Historically, Finfinnee was the convergence point for the five Gadaa assemblies, representing the centre of the loose confederation of diverse Oromo clan groups. This site of togetherness was activated not only for lengthy discussion and dialogue, unrestrained by time and space, taking months if needed and housed only by the branches of the sycamore tree (known as the Odaa) that the meetings would take place under, but, moreover, Finfinnee also provided a place for collective connection with the natural world and the Creator.
Every year, the Oromo would converge in the millions to express gratitude for the change of seasons, for livelihood, and for collective life. This celebration, Irreechaa, was banned under EPRDF rule, and although it was brought back by the current ruling party, what we now have is a pacified, desecrated, and heavily militarized version of the rite. This is because it was brought back to Addis Ababa, not to Finfinnee. If the return of Irreechaa had been to Finfinnee, rather than being performed as a plasticized event that seems to exacerbate ethnic animosities each year, it would serve as the site of dialogue and togetherness that it is meant to be.
In Finfinnee, the idea of a neighbour going without while your home is full is difficult to embrace. In Addis Ababa, your conditions and survival depend on whether or not you can successfully sell your labour. In Finfinnee, the idea of war as a solution, before all means of peaceful reconciliation are tried, even if these discussions take many months, would be an affront to what it means to inhabit the land. In Addis Ababa, war is a means to consolidate power and make those in the business of war richer. Finfinnee is governed by an entirely different set of ideals from those of Addis Ababa, and this suggestion that we find our way back to these ideals is neither archaic idealisation nor is it the fruit of exclusionary nationalism with which many associate any discussion of Finfinnee vs Addis Ababa. Rather, for the city to make way for healthy public life to emerge, it has to lose grip on its identity as a centre of surveillance and as a place that offers itself as dignifiably livable for only the political and economic elite.
The song Abba Bootii, meaning “Father of the gumboots”, by Jaalee Amantee, uses both lyrics and the music video to make intriguing and poignant commentary on the social and economic reality of this question of Addis Ababa vs Finfinnee. The gumboots, worn traditionally by male farmers and usually accompanied by a dress shirt, pants, jackets, a woollen vest, a baseball cap, and a traditional white cotton blanket draped across the top half of the body, are an aesthetic commonly associated with farming communities on the outskirts of Finfinnee, the traditional lands of the Tulama Oromo. In the chorus of the song, the artist says, “Sii ga’eera tufiin biyyaa kan keetii,” “You’ve had enough of the disdain that your country shows you,” and then goes on to say, “Fiigii Finfineeti,” meaning, “Onward to Finfinnee.” In the music video, we see a man intended to represent the Oromo who have embraced the aesthetics of modernity, stepping out of a car, dressed in semi-casual clothes. He sees mannequins dressed in the Abba Bootii aesthetic and proceeds to go and take selfies with them. As the chorus begins, the mannequins come to life and use their shimala to chase the man through the city, where he tries to escape by hiding behind different people, each of these people transforming into who all reflect to him the Abba Bootii, played by Jaalee himself. Eventually, the man ends up on land being ploughed by a man (also Jaalee) with an ox, where he faces off with the mannequins, the cityscape visible in the background. A shimala is a long stick that is commonly associated with both farming and self-defence practices among the Tulama Oromo. The act of taking a selfie with the mannequins, who are also wearing black masks to further symbolise erasure, and the ensuing confrontation, we can interpret as Jaalee’s attempt to return agency to the wearer of the gumboots in an Addis Ababa social and political environment where the way of life of those who work the land is subject to objectification and erasure.
Although this song is specific to the story of the northern Oromo farmers’ relationship to Addis Ababa and their relationship to the “modern” Oromo, we can apply the message of the song to help us further the analysis we make here. Acceptance and inclusion within the realm of Addis Ababa is conditional upon one’s ability to perform modernity, and this is not just limited to what one wears, but it also includes what one thinks about the state project. What this song implies is that the aesthetic one chooses to adorn in Addis Ababa indicates to the surveillance systems how close or how far they may be from complying with the logics of capital and the state. It is not only the Oromo who would be subjected to this assessment in Addis Ababa; rather, any person representative of the majority subsistence farming class of Ethiopia would be eyed with caution in Addis Ababa, for their rejection of Addis Ababa would be a threat that, if it grew, could collapse the state entirely.
If Addis Ababa must fence itself off from the historic and contemporary realities that created and sustain it to safeguard its survival, then it must remain perpetually alert to any signs of the return to Finfinnee, which is as much a place as it is a political reality and mindset. Finfinnee is the site within Ethiopia where a multi-national class revolution becomes a possibility. It provides the depth of recalibration needed for us to re-enter the communion of person-to-person dialogue, to extend mutual care and solidarity, and to remember a relationship to land that goes beyond extraction. Finfinnee is the third space.
